United Airlines · Technical Operations
One month of field research with United's maintenance planners, supervisors, and managers replaced a roadmap built on assumptions with one built on evidence.
This work is under NDA. The public version tells the story with details generalized and artifacts removed. The full case study is available on request.
Airline maintenance is a high-stakes balancing act. Planners, supervisors, and managers juggle aircraft availability, scheduled maintenance, and whatever broke this morning. Their software suite was an improvement over paper, but the operation had outgrown it. People ran their day on disconnected applications, manual workarounds, and tribal knowledge.
The design team's hypothesis needed testing before anything got built. Miscommunication in this domain doesn't cost conversion rate. It costs delayed aircraft.
I led semi-structured interviews across four major hubs with the five roles that run maintenance: HMC managers, shift managers, field planners, line planners, and supervisors. The goal wasn't to catalog complaints. It was to understand why every workaround existed and what it protected.
The central insight: central planners assign work from simplified system defaults, like one-hour estimates for tasks that take much longer. Local teams then spend their shift undoing the schedule and re-prioritizing by hand. And the system lets central planners override and lock those local corrections. The tool wasn't just lagging the operation. It was enforcing the wrong mental model.
We went in expecting to redesign screens. The research said the screens weren't the problem. That finding redirected the entire design phase, which is precisely what discovery research is for, and exactly why it's uncomfortable.
The research produced a strategic roadmap grounded in how the operation actually runs. Design targets shifted from cosmetic fixes to the planning disconnect, workload accuracy, and real-time awareness. The design phase that followed started from evidence, not assumption.
Interview detail, journey maps, and findings are protected to respect United's confidentiality. If we're talking about working together, ask and I'll send you the password.
Or email hello@studiogridline.com · I have the password