Designing the new generation of Alaska Airlines MxHub: dashboard built for maintenance technicians
🔒 Under NDA, so I can only share limited information
SCOPE
0 - 1
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TEAM
MxHub Team: 1 PM, 12 Engineers
TIME
11 months
Alaska Airlines currently powers over 400,000 trips every year with a fleet of 315 aircraft, supported by nearly 1,000 maintenance technicians. When we launched MxHub, a source of information application for maintenance, technicians were transitioning from a legacy system that had served them for over 27 years.
As demands grew, not only in app usage but also in terms of ever-evolving products and features, our maintenance system was ripe for a comprehensive overhaul. Notably:
We transformed aircraft maintenance into the modern era by consolidating multiple tools into one mobile-friendly solution that emphasizes efficiency and accessibility. Our situational awareness app provides real-time aircraft status, task management features, and seamless access to crucial information by integrating with key systems at Alaska Airlines.
Alaska’s brand and design system for internal tools had gone through multiple reskins and updates in visual language; we wanted the navigation surfaces to reflect a polished, professional feel consistent with the Alaska Airlines ecosystem.
So, in 2023, my team gathered at Alaska Airline’s Seattle office to rethink MxHub.
A focus on efficiency and safety
The company’s top core value is safety, and from a business perspective, time efficiency - because every minute an airplane spends on the ground between flights directly impacts our revenue. As a member of the Maintenance and Engineering team, I am directly focused on these critical values, which involve coordination with various stakeholders from different parts of the company.
With these principles in mind, we envisioned MxHub with the long term goal of enabling technicians to complete all maintenance requirements smoothly in one solution. We wanted to provide the most glanceable dashboard view, including all aircraft information, allowing technicians to quickly and easily parse real time data. We believed this would lead to more efficient maintenance operations, with improved task preparation and execution, and fewer missed details.
Challenges in design innovation in aviation
As many who work in large organizations can relate, designing and building the product isn’t the most impressive task: it’s obtaining buy-in and alignment from your internal stakeholders and partner teams. By nature, organizations tend to lean conservatively with product changes, especially in the aviation industry, because introducing new updates can lead to increased risk and potentially negative business metrics. Due to this, we embarked on an internal roadshow across the company, presenting our changes to partners including sister product teams, design systems, and user research.
Also, this project marked a renewed effort to introduce MxHub, following previous attempts by other teams that did not meet expectations. I stepped in as the third designer, inheriting a challenging situation with strained relations between stakeholders and the ITS team. My role was pivotal in resetting expectations and rebuilding trust to move the project forward.
Our turnaround can be attributed to two main factors:
My self-awareness put me in a learning mindset, which helped me create a design strategy. I began by creating raw frameworks with various concepts to deeply engage stakeholders and encourage them to think beyond their established mental models. More importantly, rather than simply asking what they wanted—knowing they had a preconceived idea—I encouraged them to articulate why they disliked the new concepts I created. This was extremely important for deeply understanding the reasons behind their choices and identifying key points for user validation.
In addition to standard slide deck presentations, we employed some creative tactics to demonstrate the delta and improvements between the old and new design.
What my colleagues say about me 🙂
