FlightBook
An app to allow pilots of AFC to modernise and strengthen club relations, our team was tasked with finding a participant group to work with in order to identify their most pressing problems and design a solution toward. Our team created an app to allow the pilots of Abbotsford Flying Club in an effort to modernise their practises and bring them up to speed with their needs.
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Understanding
The first step for our team was to put learn as much about the client as we could. We built up ethnography posters in order to understand the roles within the clubs, as well as the philosophy behind the club. We learnt that the club was founded in the 60s, intended to bring together people with a shared love for aviation.
Through our initial investigations, we found that the club members mostly consisted of older aviation enthusiasts. As of late, there had been attempts to promote the club and recruit for new members during local events. With the addition of younger members, there was a growing concern that the club's relatively dated information-recording practises and communications were getting hard to maintain due to the younger members' decreased efficiency in maintaining such records on physical books. The younger members were also concerned with the lack of engagement that the club had by way of electronic communications past basic emails.
Research
Solutions
We ideated based on the pain-points of bookkeeping and engagement, that we identified as the primary issues within the club. To address engagement between the club members, we ideated an online photo-map that would allow members to post pictures of their journeys on a digital map, with the app functioning as an aviation-specific social media site. For bookkeeping, we ideated a journal entry for general notes or stories that members would be able to share about their trips to satisfy the need for sing members having to record and maintain club functions and flight-specific details on multiple different record books.
The prototype would allow users to record their journeys and post pictures of relevant areas. Other members would be able to view this and comment on them. The flightlog section had the most relevant fields in order to quickly fill these, post-flight, and share them with other members easily.This would be in the form of map-pins that could be clicked on for an expanded blurb and image set, with a comment section. This brought a greater depth of interactivity and an interesting way of pilots to recount their stories and uncover a greater aspect of community within the club through sharing of stories.
Prototype
After further evaluation, we determined that the best course of action would be to combine the features of bookkeeping and socialisation through media sharing in order to create a more comprehensive solution that addressed a greater variety of needs than just specific areas of the club. By combining these elements, we not only addressed the club's immediate needs but also fostered a stronger sense of community among its members. This was a significant shift from our initial ideas, which treated these aspects separately and was a turning point in our project. In addition, one of the things we found was that as per aviation standards, many of the 'additional' fields that we had removed in an effort to streamline the record-keeping process did not meet aviation-specific standards. Thus, while it proved a convenient way to record, it couldn't exactly be a streamlined record-keeping process as we'd initially envisioned.
For the duration of the project, I was responsible for the creation of the journey maps, storyboards, participant group poster, interactions within the app, and the final project video. The main skills that I learned from conducting this project, aside from technical skill in Figma and Protopie, was the intensive user research process which involved identifying and getting to the heart of a problem within a target group as well as the design process that involves testing out different solutions for the problem until a satisfactory solution has been reached.