← Back to work

Federal Aviation Administration

National Airspace System

In 2020, I led design for the FAA’s first-ever product team, delivering NAS Status—the modern replacement for the legacy OIS dashboard—in under six months. OIS, a mainframe-based system restricted to two updates per year, suffered from critical technical debt. Our iterative approach drove immediate adoption, prompting the FAA to fund additional product teams and retire OIS by 2022.

National Airspace System Status ↗ (Beta)

Schedulers gathered around a desk with several monitors. The middle one shows OIS.
Schedulers gathered around a desk with several monitors. The middle one shows OIS.

Context: Old Systems, Event Streams & Publicity

OIS displays real-time events that cancel or delay flights. While the FAA targeted the general public, our research revealed that OIS users are actually Business Aviation (BA) professionals—pilots and schedulers of private jets. Unlike airlines, BA operations are flexible, making the depth of OIS critical for last-minute flight preparation.

Screenshot of OIS from 2001, identical to today's layout minus the date.
OIS August 2001. It looks almost exactly the same, down to the table headers and color.

User Research & Prioritization

We interviewed 10 BA professionals in two weeks to understand their workflows. Schedulers initially resisted change, claiming they could "glance at the tables and know what’s going on." However, observation told a different story: users struggled with buried information, obscure navigation, and technical acronyms.

Pilots faced additional hurdles. OIS displayed poorly on the tablets and phones used in the cockpit. They needed a way to translate flight delays into "intelligent-sounding" updates for their clients, but lacked the visual graphics to interpret the direction or intensity of airborne events.

A user interview screenshot. They have pulled up the ops plan, a status update and forecasting report.
Watching a user decipher the ops plan. Four separate FAA products are highlighted on their bookmarks bar because in-app navigation is so obscure.
The double diamond diagram on a whiteboard.
Plotting our discovery insights on a double diamond.

Prototyping Progress

We hypothesized that a dashboard grouped by airport—rather than event type—would streamline decision-making. Our first prototype failed; users found the granularity confusing and missed the familiar tables. We pivoted, iterating through eight rounds of research with 50 users to find the right information density.

The prototype shows all available airspace information in a readable layout, but there's too much information at too granular a level to process.
Our first test screens, including an events homepage, detail flows, and a confusing search view.

By surfacing weather maps, advisories, and real-time runway data previously hidden in other apps, we convinced skeptical power users that the increased situational awareness outweighed the change in layout. Schedulers and pilots eventually shifted from "hunting" for info to using NAS Status as their primary dashboard.

The prototype now displays seven events instead of three.
The home page with more events, but less top-level information. TEB airport's details is displayed in sentences with clear links.
Hand-drawn UI sketches on the left and the Figma version on the right.
Pre-covid, we tested a simplified airport details view at the annual Scheduler & Dispatcher conference. We got feedback the first day and heard there was too much info in the detail view. We sketched on paper that night (left), and re-tested the prototype the next day (right) to positive feedback.
Sticky notes from user interviews.
A research synthesis in Miro (iteration 4). Users said "looking really good" and "easier to read, for sure" when they saw the home page for the first time.

In our final release, we added a new header with internal links to reduce bookmark dependency and brought the operations plan to the front page so users could cross-check current events against future forecasts.

The first release of NAS contains three main sections: airport events, airspace events, and upcoming events.
The first release of the front page featured a minimum amount of info per airport card, maps for weather, and upcoming events.

Designing Around the Data

Legacy FAA data is often obscured by flight control jargon. I focused on translating complex "Flow Control" events (FCAs) into human-readable language. In the legacy system, only 5% of users understood events like FCAPV1. By introducing interactive maps and clear terminology, we enabled pilots and schedulers of all experience levels to pinpoint and plan for airborne delays effectively.

JX7 image accessed through a tiny link. PV1 is literally just a picture of an unlabeled blue sea and a superimposed triangle.
Legacy OIS first requires a user to know what an FCA is and click the FCA link in the table. They then decipher table data and a contextless picture of the ocean.
The home page with two FCA events. Each FCA has an interactive map depicting the event's location. A closeup of the FCAPV1 zoomed in with embedded map controls, displaying a triangle over the Turks & Caicos airport.
An interactive map and human-readable language are key to understanding whether a flight is affected, and if so, what they can do about it.
A busy day with 10+ events depicted in NAS.
NAS Status populated with live events.
← Back to work