Overview
The Opportunity
Boeing sought to redefine digital learning in their training facilities for maintenance technicians. With maintenance training being a critical component of the delivery of a new airplane, they needed a more personalized, adaptable, and portable training experience that could accelerate training time and replicate hands-on experience, while still being in the classroom setting.
The Hurdle
Boeing’s instructors were experts in their fields but recognized that lecture-based teaching wasn’t as engaging as it could be. Hands-on access to planes was costly and infrequent, creating a gap between learning and application. They wanted to improve accessibility and the teaching model but lacked a clear solution. Additionally, effective classroom elements relied on sets of wall mounted screens, making them difficult to adapt to a portable, single-screen format.
The Solution
Working together, we shifted their learning model from an instructor-driven lecture based approach, to a student paced “learn by doing” model in a portable, single screen, simulation experience. This approach increased student engagement, decrease costs to the company, created new revenue streams, and provide the same level of experience whether it was performed on-site in the manufacturer’s classroom, or in one of their buyer’s classrooms.
Details
Business Impact: Successfully launched internally and become a new line of revenue with Boeing’s customer base.
Project Length: 7 years
Team Size: 7
My Role: Design Director
My Contributions:
Product Design Management
Design Team Leadership
User Research
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Motion design
Stakeholder management
Quality Assurance
Results
With continued and expanded phases of the simulation training being deployed, the project redefined the educational experience within the engineering and manufacturing industry. Additionally, it generated new lines of revenue for the client and spurred new ways of thinking about innovation and creating value-added services for their business. This project has become a benchmark for other innovation teams within the Boeing’s organization, sparking innovation and change.
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“How can we embed the expertise of the instructor into the user experience?”
Discover
Research
To gain a deeper understanding of the problem space, we conducted interviews with both students and instructors to identify their goals, needs, and pain points related to the classroom training experience. This included exploring both the theoretical instruction that takes place in the classroom and the practical, hands-on training that occurs "on the line." Insights from these conversations were synthesized into user stories, which served as a foundation for generating and evaluating product ideas.
Tasks Performed
Contextual inquiries with Instructors
Experience mapping workshops with client
Student interviews
Experience Mapping
Experience Map artifacts by Clemente Miller
Classroom instructor Experience Maps
Student Behavioral Archetypes
Concepts
More specifically, our goal was to capture the expertise of instructors and translate it into a portable, scalable experience. Through our research and close collaboration with instructors, we discovered that there were several distinct approaches to delivering maintenance training in the classroom.
These approaches led to five different prototype concepts. Each of these concepts were fleshed out by the team into prototypes, from simple click-throughs to more complex builds that utilized manipulatable 3D assets on tablets.
Concept 1: Progressive Build
Concept 2: Mechanical Sim
Concept: Limited Sim
Concept 4: Line Oriented Sim
Concept 5: Instructor Dashboard
Early Prototypes
Following the Experience Mapping workshops, we gained clearer insights into the goals, needs, and pain points of both instructors and students. These findings informed our efforts to translate the traditional analog classroom experience into interactive digital prototypes.
An issue of real estate…
One of the main design challenges was fitting all essential content onto a single screen without relying on an external monitor. This constraint required us to thoughtfully design and test navigation across various elements—including questions, interaction panels, the flight deck, schematics, and reference materials. To keep things moving quickly, we paper prototyped initial concepts for team alignment and further exploration.
Prototype Creation
Making it all fit
Once we aligned on UX patterns via paper prototypes, we needed to translate those ideas into something more concrete for engineers to build off of. Below are a few motion studies I created to guide the creation of Unity prototypes we would later use in testing with students and instructors.
Testing
We then conducted testing sessions with both students and instructors to evaluate whether the features within our various prototypes effectively addressed the business challenges while delivering an improved user experience.
In addition to traditional usability testing methods, we organized internal “science fairs”—Agile-style demo days open to the broader organization. These events allowed us to showcase progress, gather feedback, and generate cross-functional awareness. Over time, these sessions have continued and evolved, playing a key role in driving organizational change by increasing visibility into the product’s development and success, particularly among teams less familiar with Agile practices.
Results
& Insights
Initial concepts tested well and led to much discussion about what was feasible to move forward with. As Boeing’s digital transformation was in nascent stages, it became clear that while all the prototype ideas were useful, there was still a question about which would prove to be most useful to reduce practical training costs (expensive) and be the best replacement for student engagement and learning retention. Ultimately, the choice to move forward with the Line Oriented Sim (prototype 2) was the way forward.
Design
User Flows
Architecture & User Flow
LOS Current state overview
Decision tree future state
Interaction Design
Another critical component of the experience required students to use analogue teaching materials as they progress through the digital content. To integrate this requirement into the experience, data input methods needed to be explored and tested within the evolving prototypes.
Style Guide & Design Kit
Build
A new product
The Line Oriented Scenario (LOS) was the first simulation-based product of its kind brought to market by Boeing. It was strategically bundled with aircraft sales, establishing a new revenue stream and enhancing the overall value proposition for customers.
Fitting the entire classroom experience on one portable laptop was key to the products success. It also made for significant UX challenges.
Menu for lesson selection
Deeper Engagmement
Lesson Objectives
Lesson step
Minimap Engine Inboard
Environment simulation
Component interaction: By interacting directly with the environment, students increase task comprehension and retain information better.
Interactive environment
Complete lesson
The future
Moving forward..
We continued our collaboration with Boeing to design a comprehensive ecosystem of products and experiences that support the digital classroom. This included planning and executing a three-year product roadmap featuring tools such as an LOS authoring platform for maintenance instructors. To validate the roadmap, we conducted sentiment research with customers to assess their interest in and willingness to adopt these tools. While initial leadership assumptions projected strong demand, our research revealed a more nuanced perspective. These insights prompted strategic discussions with the C-suite, ultimately leading to a reprioritized roadmap aligned with actual user needs and behaviors.
Talking to customers…
Interviewed Aerospace training customers around the world.
Introduced "the difficult truths". Clients loved frank voice of customer.
This became "Aerospace Authoring Tool" two years later.
How might we get there…
A key piece of getting Boeing leadership buy in was generating a multi-year road map, complete with workstreams, actvities, deliverables and business impact.
