Rosenverse
Look, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Look, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace

Thursday, October 27, 2022 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Look, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace
Speakers: Teresa Swingler
Link:

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

  • •

    Honeywell Aerospace designs avionics and flight systems, not entire aircraft like Boeing or Airbus.

  • •

    Safety is non-negotiable in aerospace design, with many products needing certification before use.

  • •

    Urban air mobility aims to reduce road congestion by providing electric air taxi services profitable by 2028.

  • •

    Flight control design is inspired by video game interfaces to simplify operation for pilots without traditional aviation backgrounds.

  • •

    Pilot training for UAM aims to reduce qualification time from 1500 hours to two weeks by simplifying controls.

  • •

    Honeywell uses rapid, low-fidelity prototyping to test ideas quickly and cancel unviable products early.

  • •

    The pet travel smart kennel concept failed because of COVID-era travel restrictions and negative media.

  • •

    Future air traffic infrastructure will require new airways and waypoints akin to roads to manage UAM vehicle flow.

  • •

    Pilot feedback on gaming-style controls varies with experience; newer pilots have less bias and are more open.

  • •

    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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Benjamin Wiedmaier
Redefining Toolkits: Unbundling to Create a Perfect Match
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Harry Max
Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Cutting through the Noise
2020 • DesignOps Community
Anat Fintzi
Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Etienne Fang
The Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Ash Brown
Silver Linings: What DesignOps Learned in the Shift to WFH
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Scott Stephens
The Next Generation in DesignOps Toolsets
2022 • DesignOps Community
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jessamyn Edwards
Surviving Your UX Career in Enterprise Design
2021 • Enterprise Community
Sarah Fathallah
A Typology of Participation in Participatory Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Mike Oren
Design Research Strategy & Strategic Design Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Robin Beers
Navigating organizational systems: Rethinking researcher’s role in driving change
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Catt Small
What's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Jon White
Unsticking Research for Better Information Flow
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold

More Videos

Shipra Kayan

"The rebrand caused our NPS to plummet and freaked out our executives — that was the trigger to get serious."

Shipra Kayan

How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up

September 30, 2021

Peter Morville

"Every few years consultants come in and tidy up our mess, but as soon as they leave, we mess it all up again."

Peter Morville

The Architecture of Understanding

May 13, 2015

Renee Reid

"Only one internal hire on the UX team was a huge misopportunity for us."

Renee Reid

Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)

June 3, 2019

Dane DeSutter

"Gestures serve as a window into the embodied mind by replaying prior embodied experiences when we communicate."

Dane DeSutter

Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not

March 26, 2024

Sam Proulx

"The four Cs—consistency, convenience, confidence, and customizability—are not just good for accessibility, they make a great experience for everyone."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

October 3, 2023

Andrew Custage

"Digital channels now have higher standards—customers expect personalization at all times."

Andrew Custage Michael Mallett

The Digital Journey: Research on Consumer Frustration and Loyalty

March 29, 2023

Shelby Switzer

"Persisting conversations in Slack instead of Zoom chat means folks can revisit and join conversations asynchronously."

Shelby Switzer

Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World

December 10, 2021

Llewyn Paine

"Generative AI is non-deterministic and doesn’t understand meaning, so baseline error rates exist in all tools we use."

Llewyn Paine

Coexisting with AI: A practical guide for researchers to navigate tools, ethics, and integration

March 11, 2025

Robin Beers

"Learning is the new knowing, and researchers are catalysts of organizational learning."

Robin Beers

Navigating organizational systems: Rethinking researcher’s role in driving change

March 13, 2025