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Look, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace
Summary
Watch to learn about how Honeywell Aerospace’s design team helps customers create aircraft that are a pleasure to fly, affordable to maintain, and good for the planet. In this interactive session with Teresa Swingler, our community members learned how we use both traditional and modern UX/UI techniques to understand customers’ needs and translate them into experiences that are intuitive, safe, and sustainable.
Key Insights
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Honeywell Aerospace designs avionics and flight systems, not entire aircraft like Boeing or Airbus.
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Safety is non-negotiable in aerospace design, with many products needing certification before use.
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Urban air mobility aims to reduce road congestion by providing electric air taxi services profitable by 2028.
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Flight control design is inspired by video game interfaces to simplify operation for pilots without traditional aviation backgrounds.
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Pilot training for UAM aims to reduce qualification time from 1500 hours to two weeks by simplifying controls.
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Honeywell uses rapid, low-fidelity prototyping to test ideas quickly and cancel unviable products early.
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The pet travel smart kennel concept failed because of COVID-era travel restrictions and negative media.
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Future air traffic infrastructure will require new airways and waypoints akin to roads to manage UAM vehicle flow.
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Pilot feedback on gaming-style controls varies with experience; newer pilots have less bias and are more open.
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Balancing emotional design quality and concrete safety metrics presents unique challenges in aerospace UX.
Notable Quotes
"Design is at the heart of everything we do at Honeywell Aerospace."
"Safety first is a must; flying has to be clean, effective, and safe — not easy from conventional helicopters."
"Urban air mobility business is expected to be profitable by 2028, helping solve dense city congestion."
"We want it to take two weeks instead of two years for a skilled operator to pilot these new vehicles."
"We're borrowing from video game design: simplified layouts, spatial sound, and haptics to enhance user experience."
"We make life or death decisions with design much more often than typical software design."
"We encourage canceling programs very fast if research shows lack of need to avoid wasted effort."
"What if flying was as easy as driving a car? That was our main question designing user interfaces."
"Pilot onboarding includes extensive checklists that are only now being digitized from paper."
"There isn’t yet a good way to measure emotional quality of design, only accuracy, safety, and cost."
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