Reducing cognitive load and flight delays
Restructured an operations platform serving 20k pilots.
Context
Redesigning a legacy pilot operations platform for one of the world's largest airline carriers, running a 40-year-old platform for pilot and ground-support operations.
Challenge
24 primary navigation menus, with 50+ items when dropdowns were included, buried critical pre-flight and post-flight information. With every piece of operational content living in the same surface, pilots and support staff faced severe information overload when they needed answers in seconds, not minutes.
How we helped
Led a 10-month research engagement: 40+ interviews, live card sorting, contextual inquiry with duty pilots, wireframing, and iterative usability testing across web and mobile, to restructure the platform's information architecture from the ground up.
The impact
- •Consolidated 24 primary navigation menus into 5 categories, organizing 50+ items including dropdowns
- •1,000+ pieces of content tagged and organized into a working hierarchy
- •Findings directly informed the platform's CMS relaunch and handoff content templates
I had the pleasure of working alongside Anastasia for 10 months on a client project where she served as the lead UX researcher. As the principal researcher and designer on the team, I got to see firsthand the depth of her expertise and the energy she brought to the work.
Anastasia led all facets of the research effort, from recruiting users and conducting interviews, to synthesizing data, coordinating and helping facilitate collaborative workshops, and managing a wide range of stakeholders. She not only brought structure and clarity to a complex research process, but also demonstrated a knack for adjusting course and offering fresh strategies when something wasn't quite working.
Beyond her research skills, Anastasia built strong rapport with the client through her natural enthusiasm, articulate communication, and thoughtful approach to collaboration, qualities that helped us build trust and ultimately secure buy-in for user research from a client who had historically been hesitant to invest in it.
I'd highly recommend Anastasia to any team looking for a skilled, strategic, and collaborative UX researcher.
Methods
- User Interviews
- Contextual Inquiry
- Usability Testing
- Wireframing
- Card Sorting
- Journey Mapping
- Service Blueprint
- Personas
- Jobs-to-be-Done
- A/B Testing
Tools
- Aurelius
- Dovetail
- Airtable
Standards & research foundations
- Information Architecture
- Cognitive Load
- Pilot Workload
- Human-Machine Interaction
- Human Error Reduction
