Aeromedical Evacuation Planning
Aeromedical evacuation planning ensures the swift and efficient transportation of patients, especially in critical situations where time and care are of the essence. I led the design effort to bring Aeromedical Evacuation planning capabilities to our existing enterprise air mobility planning platform.
My Role
Company
Team
Time Frame
Security Limitations
Because this work involved Secret Security clearance, I’m unable to share many specific deliverables and details. Instead, I'll focus on the UX process I took to bring aeromedical evacuation planning capabilities to our air mobility planning platform.
Overview
Challenge
The life saving task of aeromedical evacuation (AE) planning is a complex and nonlinear process due to the coordination required across various agencies, the need for specialized medical teams, and the variety of patient needs that may arise.
Through user research we identified several pain points that were exacerbating the AE planning complexity:
Required ten independent tools/docs from start to finish
Repetitive data entry
Manual data analysis
Results
73% Decrease in number of tools required
Eliminated repetitive data entry
Introduced two new analysis tools
25% reduction in time on task (predicted)
Research
How do AE Planners Plan?
I collaborated with members of our product management team to conduct eight user exploratory research sessions, producing over nine hours of user interview footage.
Research goals:
Understand the legacy AE planning process
Understand the advantages and disadvantages of that process
Understand what tools are being used
Analysis methods:
Journey mapping to understand the greater context of AE Planning
Document fine details in user flows
Affinity mapping to dive deeper into key pain points
"How might we" and "what if" question writing
A Cyclical Process
Due to the complexity of the existing AE planning process we conducted the research and analysis concurrently, conducting follow-up user interviews to address new edge cases as they came to light.
Findings
Pain Points
Too many platforms - AE planners used over ten independent platforms/docs resulting in a lot of dragging screens back and forth, clicking back and forth between platforms
Repetitive data entry - Planners were required to enter the same data on three separate occasions, costing users time and cognitive burden, while introducing more opportunity for human error.
Manual analysis - AE Planners relied on a mix of manual and automated analysis. Users expressed two manual calculations that were particularly time consuming.
Maintaining User Autonomy
AE Planners expressed the crucial need for flexibility and automoy. In other words, they need to "edit" any aspect of their plan in case unique factors need to be considered that can't be accounted for in advance (unpredictable natural disaster conditions, or a change in budget, procedure, etc.)
Ideation
Sketches and Low-Fidelity Wireframing
AE planning capabilities were entirely new to our platform, making the ideation process exciting and full of creative potential.
PM Feedback: "Do we really need these unique features?"
I presented my low-fi wireframes to a subset of the team (product and UX) to collaboratively identify the best path forward. This sparked key questions, such as why AE planning required a deviation from similar planning types.
From a user experience standpoint, reusing other mission planning flows wouldn’t impact AE planners, as they weren’t expected to switch between them. However, it was crucial from a development cost perspective.
To fully answer this question I performed a comparative analysis to pinpoint the areas where AE planners had unique needs not yet addressed in our app.
Prototyping
MidFi Iterations and Arch Feedback
Next I iterated on mid-fi user flows and wireframes. I brought these to our cross-functional team of PMs, architects, and designers for feedback.
During our discussion we identified an edge case (logistics of how international planning can impact domestic planning) so I collaborate with PMs to get clarity from our AE Planner users and made necessary design updates.
Clickable HiFi Prototype
Next I translated my wire-flows to a clickable, high fidelity prototype. I presented this prototype to the cross-functional team to confirm the design met architectural and product goals before bringing it to our external stakeholders.
Unfortunately, due to national security and NDA considerations, I’m unable to share further specifics of the design solutions I created.
The team was excited to see the designs were meeting user needs while keeping development costs in mind.
User Feedback
Due to time and resource constraints of our specialized user base, I wasn't able to conduct formal user testing. Instead, PMs and I presented the prototype to AE Planning and government stakeholders for feedback. Based on their input, we prioritized a tool originally planned for a later release due to its expected time-saving impact.
Results
73% Decrease in Number of Tools Required
Our platform will allow AE Planners to do 73% of their workflow within one app, reducing unnecessary clicking back and forth between windows, and trying to manage multipole tools at once.
Elimination of Required Data Entry
Another important impact of decreasing the number of tools required to complete the planning process was increased data integration, meaning users now would have no time-consuming, error-introducing manual data entry!
2 New Data Analysis Tools
I designed two new data analysis tools that take the place of tedious manual data analysis processes.
Maintaining User Autonomy
I incorporated user over-ride and edit capabilities throughout their workflow to account for unpredictable variables inherent to AE planning.
