Site Scan's flight app was originally designed for a single drone experience. Since it was originally built, we have added in 9 vehicles, 3D flight planning, 5 flight modes, customizable map options, and manual flying.

The experience was starting to feel disjointed to our users as we continued to build quickly. My goal here was to find the flows where we could improve or automate the UX experience of our users today as well as finding space for our app to grow in the coming years. 

Existing Workflows & Field Research

I had heard from our Success services team over the past few months that certain areas of the app were feeling confusing to customers since we began to grow our fleets and expand the app across teams. So I wanted to add in specific prompts for connecting to a drone and planning a flight for later.

I originally came up with our primary existing workflows to identify field prompts. I wanted these to be relatively open-ended to find major problem areas during testing. 

I began by performing 5 internal flight tests and 1 customer test. Each session was ~45 minutes.

User testing prompts

Sign in & connect to your drone

Create a flight plan to fly later

Fly a basic area survey that lasts 3 minutes

Fly a manual flight & take 10 photos

Fly a perimeter scan that lasts 5 minutes

Sorting the Feedback

From here, I initially sorting the data by the tester, then broke up that feedback by the actual flight journey. I sometimes do this on sticky notes but for this instance, I wanted to try all synthesis in google sheets.

List View, Sorted by Workflows, Sorted by people

Reviewing problem areas 

After gathering & sorting feedback, I built out our workflows and identified problem areas. These included:

• Manually or automatically connecting to your drone depending on vehicle type
• User understanding which flight mode to select & initial setup of any flight plan
• Getting stuck in prefligh checklist
• Difficult to see UI in sun
• Clear feedback from the drone during flight
• Prompting the user to upload photos after a landing

Two 'How Might We' Brainstorms

I facilitated 2 'how might we' brainstorm sessions with team members on our iOS team, flight team, head of product & engineering, and the product team (total 8 participants). The first session was based on flight planning & post flight problem areas and the second was based on the in-flight experience.

HMW Prompts - Flight planning & post flight

• How might we make connecting to a drone for the first time user easier?
• How might we incorporate an industry based flight mode into the planning process?
• How might we make our preflight checklist more clear?
• How might we make landing-to-processed images more intuitive?
  
  

HMW Prompts - In Flight

• How might we present aircraft state, health, warnings, and errors?
• How might we explain to a user what drone is going to do next?
• How might we seamlessly integrate multiple flights into one?
• How might we help visualize where your vehicle is in space?

Hardware & pilot research

I did research on additional problem areas like glare, outdoor UI, and pilot experiences that make pilots feel comfortable. Some insights include:

• Dark screens & ipads have more glare in the sun, so we should start offering white ipads since our users are in the field
• You need high contrast UI elements in the sun, so we should most likely have a light UI with dark bolder typography
• Telemetry, or flight data, needs to be large and immediately apparent to pilots. Specifically involving progress & drone location. 
• Alert systems UI needs to be consistent visually and interactively to make people feel safe & comfortable flying
• Align remote control elements to digital UI
  

UX Conceptual Design

I To wrap the project, I created a conceptual UX design for the flight app, including a new interaction model focusing on a map first approach, pre flight planning, device onboarding, flight alerts, and post flight data processing.