Online Review – PINEAPPLE POP Creative

Collins Aerospace | Online review

Collins Aerospace is a leader in technologically advanced and intelligent solutions for the global aerospace and defense industry.

Within the Mission Systems business unit, the publications and training group supports enterprise engineering by creating required training and support materials for the products Collins manufactures. Engineering holds design authority for the products, and as such, needs to review and sign-off on all training material and support manuals the publications and training group creates. These product reviews are handled via an online review application where engineers sign-in, download manuals and training products, review and comment on them, and then record their approval (or disapproval).

The online review tool also provides reports and statuses used by management.

Impact

The impact of rebuilding the online review application has been positive.

80% reduction in the number of products that require additional reviews due to conflicting direction
10% reduction in the amount of time required to complete reviews due to having to scroll
25% reduction in the amount of time required to find information in the reports

People problem & business goals

The online engineering review tool was created in the the late 90s using ASP and vb.net. In 2018, the software suffered a catastrophic failure that created a work stoppage. No one on the application support team was familiar with ASP or vb.net and had not been involved in creating or maintaining the tool.

Instead of learning ASP and vb.net, I put together a business case that convinced management it was a better use of time and resources to allow my team to recreate the application using modern frameworks which we knew well and had the skills to support.

Due to the nature of the issue (a work-stoppage and risk of missing customer deliveries) the goals were:

Rebuild the tool as a web application on a modern framework (Spring, Thymeleaf/Bootstrap)
Improve usability to the extent possible

Research & Analysis

Due to the urgency of rebuilding the online review application, I conducted accelerated research with engineers, content creators, and management to gather requirements. While I had never used the online review application, I was able to find a large user guide with screenshots and directions for use, which aided me in leading discussions.

After working with users, I determined that the old online engineering review application:

Was utilitarian and unnecessarily complex. For example, if users didn’t use a hyperlink to direct them to a specific review, when they logged in they were greeted with a blank page that contained no information or directions – just a sidebar navigation with text links.
Was tedious to use.
- The review pages were laid out like a report with a single piece of information on each line. This required users to scroll up and down the page to find to information.
- The reports often had to be combined to get a full picture of a product status – so users had to switch between reporting screens continuously
Promoted errors and rework. Each user saw their own page, and did not have access or visibility to comments from other reviewers. This allowed users to submit conflicting comments that weren’t noticed or resolved until after the review was completed.

Initial sketches

I was able to immediately create several sketches for the landing page and the review page. I concentrated on displaying the right information in a more concise layout – so that users wouldn’t have to scroll up and down or flip between screens to find the information they needed.

Once the team had the initial sketches to review, I went to work redesigning the reports. The reports were all in table format – which users wanted to keep. I worked with users to determine which information was useful in each report. I then recreated all of the reports on a single page. I was able to combine and reduce duplicate information and combined all ten tables into a single table – reducing the number of screens and complexity of the application by 70%. I also added sorting and filtering features to the table, which was not in the original application and users loved.

Build and testing

Due to the urgency of the rebuild, after the expedited research and design phase, my team started the build. A teammate built the backend while I built the front-end using HTML, Thymeleaf, Bootstrap, css, and javascript.

After a day of user testing, we launched the application.

Screenshots

Landing page

Users are greeted with a simple landing page. The landing page has two sections. The top section lists any product reviews assigned to the user. The bottom section lists all products that have active reviews against them.

Reviews

The review page was redesigned to be compact and provide all the essential information a reviewer or manager might need in one place. The top section of the page contains basic product information (part number, title, work request, due date, contact information for the content creator in the event there are questions or issues), etc. The middle section of the page displays the status from each of the required reviewers (not approved, approved, disapproved). This allows the team to know at a glance who still needs to approve the product. The bottom section of the page displays all comments. This allows engineers and managers to review comments and resolve any discrepancies before the review is complete. This has led to faster cycle times, fewer escapes, and happier customers.

Reporting

With some thoughtful analysis, I combined 10 separate reports into a single report. Per the user request, the format was kept tabular. I added sorting and filtering features that were not available in the original application.

Check out the
Workflow management system >