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ForeFlight Summer 2022 Internship

During my summer internship with ForeFlight, one of my projects was to assist a fellow designer in creating  a new custom range rings feature in Flitedeck Pro X.

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Background​

The goal of the custom range rings feature is to provide users with an in-app system to gauge their distance from certain points in space (airports, volcanos, etc.).

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We met with our design team manager, as well as a couple of product managers, to better understand the scope of the feature and its main use cases.

Defining Goals

Once we had a general overview of the purpose this feature should serve, we began to brainstorm the questions we would need to answer in order to create the most useful MVP.

Broad Questions

  • When would custom range rings be helpful? 

  • In which situations might custom range rings do more harm than good? When might they be distracting, confusing, etc.?

  • For which objects would custom range rings be most beneficial?

  • How could a custom range ring effectively notify a pilot of his or her distance from a certain point without causing distraction? What visual elements would grab their attention effectively?

Narrow Questions

  • What should be the default radius for a custom range ring?nShould this differ for various types of objects? (airports, waypoints, etc.)?

  • Would one notification upon intersecting the range ring be sufficient? Should there be more frequent notifications as the pilot nears the object of interest?

  • Are there certain "categories" of waypoints for which custom range rings would be more helpful?

  • Is there any benefit to knowing when the user is in the overlapping portion between two custom range rings?

Initial Designs + User Test Flow

We began designing a low-fidelity prototype inspired by our pre-existing ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards) feature, which also uses rings. 

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During this process, we focused on two aspects of this feature:​

  1. How the custom range rings should look when displayed on the screen

  2. The process of adding, editing, and deleting custom range rings

We designed a variety of range rings varying in color, opacity, border thickness, etc. After a brief consultation with the product management team and a few fellow designers, we decided that our initial prototype would feature brown range rings with a dashed border and a 15% color fill.​

SingleRangeRing.jpeg

Single Range Ring Display

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Overlapping Range Ring Display

For consistency's sake, we designed a system of creating, editing, and deleting custom range rings similar to that for ETOPs.

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Creating the range ring from object details

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Changing the radius

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Selecting the radius from default

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Viewing finalized range ring from object details

Using the low-fidelity prototype, we created a test-flow for our first round of user testing. The test script encouraged the user to perform relevant tasks such as creating a custom range ring around a certain object, changing the size of said range ring, deleting said range ring, and adding a second range ring. 

User Testing: Round 1

We complete an initial test of our first prototype with a pilot who regularly uses FliteDeck Pro X while flying. Overall, our test user found the feature intuitive and provided several potential use cases for which it would be valuable.

However, our test user did mention a changes he would like to see:

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