From 13 steps across 7 tools to one portal.

One discrepancy, up to 13 steps across 7 tools.

When a technician finds an issue on an aircraft, logging it should take minutes. Instead it meant moving between a paper logbook, aircraft messages and several maintenance systems, then checking that the data matched. Where the tools stopped, people filled the gaps with spreadsheets, Teams threads and phone calls.

A simplified trail of one discrepancy. System names are left out.

I went to where the work happens.

Over three and a half years I traveled to Seattle three to four times a year to spend time with technicians and controllers on their shifts. Those visits built the trust and the context behind every decision: which tools they rely on, where the work breaks down, and why the workarounds exist.

Alongside the visits, I ran a jobs-to-be-done study to map the work as it really happens, not as the org chart describes it.

Leaders were deciding without data.

The research showed the cost of the current tools, but decisions about them were still being made on opinion. I worked directly with the Director of Maintenance & Engineering for most of the engagement, alongside the VP of Digital Transformation, to change that.

I turned the research into an interactive Day in the Life of an Aircraft microsite. It follows one aircraft through a day when something goes wrong and puts every tool, handoff, goal and the future vision in one place. For the first time, leadership could see the whole day before choosing what to build.

The six flight phases the microsite follows, simplified. The microsite itself belongs to Alaska Airlines.

One destination: the M&E Portal.

The evidence gave everyone the same direction. We built the M&E Portal, and five of the 14 tools already live inside it, so technicians and controllers open one application instead of five. The remaining tools are moving toward the same portal.

Designing what goes inside.

Consolidating tools only helps if the new home is faster than the old ones. Three moments from that work:

• Aircraft messages, in context. I facilitated a discovery workshop around one hypothesis: bring the message stream into the portal as a prioritized feed, so the message that matters surfaces first
• A Help Center inside the workflow, so technicians find answers without leaving the task in front of them
• AMS live events built for speed: real-time search with highlighted matches, sort and filter panels, on a design system I migrated to Alaska's Material UI–based library

From design to code in under a day.

To keep up with the portal's pace, I set up an AI-assisted design-to-dev workflow. UI work that had been scoped for about three sprints was delivered in under a day, and other teams adopted the workflow. I'm now leading UX for the modernization of an aircraft monitoring app that has been in use for more than 20 years.