A team of University of Michigan students who met in a School of Information course have designed a user-centered interface that streamlines the complex work of air traffic managers, improving their abilities to keep flights running smoothly and safely.

Sinan Abdulhak, Anthony Tyler Carvette and Kate Shen developed the interface for the national Traffic Flow Management - Application Integration Design (TFM-AID) Challenge sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

The design earned the team first place and a $25,000 grand prize. 

With this achievement, the team’s ideas could influence the future of the FAA’s air traffic management system, which serves 2.9 million passengers across more than 45,000 flights every day.

User experience is a universal skill

Information science is interdisciplinary, and the students on this project brought diverse perspectives to the FAA challenge. Abdulhak is a senior studying Industrial and Operations Engineering, Shen recently graduated from the Stamps School of Art & Design with a minor from the School of Information, and Carvette graduated from the School of Information in the spring and is embarking on his accelerated master's program at UMSI this fall. 

Each enrolled in SI 425: Introduction to User Modeling to practice centering the user in their work. The first time they teamed up was on a semester-long case study examining how to grow TripAdvisor’s user base with subscription models. 

When Abdulhak was notified of the FAA’s design competition, he was excited to reunite with his teammates from the School of Information course to take on a real-world user experience challenge. 

“That energy was there from all of us,” Abdulhak says. “If we could make this, it will have a real-world effect on how FAA controllers work for decades.” 

Reaching that goal was an immense technical task, says Max Li, the U-M assistant professor of aerospace engineering who advised the team. 

“They had to leverage each of their individual strengths and perspectives — industrial and operations engineering, airline management, user experience design, informatics and data analysis — to build a truly comprehensive product,” Li says. 

Speaking the language of the user

The FAA TFM-AID challenge was designed to solicit ideas from U.S. university students that could be evaluated and incorporated into the FAA’s modernization of its air traffic management system.

Carvette brought skills he learned from UMSI coursework on field research in the public sector, and credits UMSI’s Scott TenBrink with guiding him through the process of interviewing users and creating user surveys. The team knew they needed to dig deep across conversations with various users and experts to innovate effectively. 

To start, the team needed to learn the language of air traffic managers. 

“Understanding the acronyms and workflow of national traffic management officers, which are the users that we were trying to work with, was important,” Carvette says. “Once we were able to get up to speed, we felt confident enough to be able to establish our credibility with them and talk with them.”

The team conducted user interviews with FAA traffic managers in Florida and New York and NASA human factors engineers to vet their design concepts. These efforts earned them high praise from competition judges during preliminary design reviews: 

“Kudos to the team for not only engaging with traffic flow management experts, but taking the time to synthesize and apply feedback and lessons learned,” the judges wrote. “The user can be easily overlooked when trying to modernize older systems; your focus on ensuring that this does not happen is vital to the aviation world.” 

A better experience for everyone involved in a flight

The team presented their final submission, aMaize - A Unified Graphical User Interface for Flow Management Data and Services, at the FAA TFM-AID Challenge Forum in June 2023. Their design focused on unifying the more than 20 applications that air traffic managers currently use to track flight-affecting factors, like weather, rocket launches or military airspace closures. 

The design reduces chances for user error and distraction by gathering those apps into one interface with a consistent user experience, eliminating the user’s need to jump between windows and repeat data entries.

The team's video guide to using aMaize

Shen, Carvette and Abdulhak prioritized improving the legibility and usability of the system’s data visualizations. 

They added a chat function so air traffic managers could also use the system to share information and collaborate on issues.     

“We were able to design something that communicates problems clearly so users can get to better solutions more quickly,” Abdulhak says. “That will cascade to a better experience, fewer delays and a better strategy for those on the plane.” 

Information, engineering and art make a winning team

The team shares a combined sense of awe and honor from earning the chance to innovate for the FAA. 

And in the process of achieving their goal, they’ve gained understanding of how diverse perspectives contribute to a top user experience interface design. 

“I’ve learned more about collaborating with my teammates in a well-rounded manner, honing in on all of our skill sets to utilize our knowledge in different areas, and combining them to create a masterpiece,” Shen says.