Deliveries

I was known as the Windows 8 Champion during my two and a half years at Boeing. I saw it's potential as the productive mobile operating system for the company. It was wicked fast to navigate with your fingers and plugged right into the company's supporting infrastructure. I was able to incubate it for a bit until it was ready for production use by building executive dashboards, news feeds and other apps. Finally the oppurtunity came.

The Use Case

One of the final steps in delivering a $300 million airplane is the customer inspection process. A client representative walks through the airplane with a Boeing inspector making note of any defects that need addressing before we tossed them the keys. In the rare case a scratch was found, the inspector scribbled some paper notes, took a Polaroid and handed the two to a runner to start getting the item worked. This was the perfect job for a modern, mobile app.

The Team

We were a rag tag team of some of the youngest employees at Boeing; a designer, project manager, and two developers. I lead the technical development but saw the value in a great UX design. Not only would the extra polish reflect well on the company in front of customers but I knew our users would be excited to use the app if it felt world class.

We had a lot to prove, and worked in weekly sprints. Three months later we were feature complete and getting feedback from the front line workers. One obstacle we anticipated was mobile data entry can be cumbersome with imprecise fingers. Thankfully, Windows 8 came with fantastic pen support. I remember turning raised eyebrows into giddy smiles when users realized how much easier we had just made their job.