I designed a unified analytics dashboard that consolidates scattered passenger Wi-Fi data into one platform and transforms 15-hour manual reporting processes into 2-hour workflows, giving airlines like Delta and American real-time visibility into Wi-Fi performance and passenger satisfaction.
ROLE
As the Lead designer and researcher, driving the end-to-end design process, and conducted stakeholder interviews, workflow analysis, and platform audits while designing the UI/UX, IA, and data visualizations while working closely with the PAX team, APMs, and TAMs.
Airlines had no self-service access to Wi-Fi performance data. Viasat's support team spent 15+ hours monthly manually compiling reports from scattered systems, pulling them away from resolving passenger issues. Airlines only learned about problems days or weeks later.
We saw an opportunity to create a solution that could prevent service disruptions, save thousands in reactive troubleshooting, and help Viasat build trust with airline partners.
Early iterations added temporal comparisons, derived metrics like "Average Cases per Flight," and improved hierarchy through thematic grouping. However, redundant donut charts, equal visual weight between critical metrics (response time spikes) and minor data points (email volume), and missing context still made it difficult for users to identify what mattered.
Later versions prioritized precision and storytelling: trend graphs with hover tooltips provided both scale and context, color-coded up/down arrows enabled quick performance scanning, and strategic data reduction focused on problem-solving over completeness.
Elevating passenger data from reporting to intelligence
By incorporating some smart interaction patterns like timeline scrubbing, persistent sidebars, color-coded diagnostics, we transformed a functional dashboard into a useful tool that help both internal teams and airline customers to connect passenger complaints with technical issues.
The Flight list view provides live diagnostic view of specific aircraft connectivity, passenger care issues, and service health metrics along the real-time flight path. The timeline scrubber lets users examine multiple data points at any given moment to quickly spot aberrations for support escalation. This gives immediate context and history with cross-system visibility without leaving the page.