United was losing 5 to 10 ballasts a day, at $75 each.
Project
United Airlines Ballast Management
Client
United Airlines
My Role
Lead UX/UI Designer and Researcher
Timeline
Results
8 months
40% reduction in manual entry errors
$75 per ballast, an estimated $11,000 to $22,000 lost monthly before this system
5 distinct user roles designed for, from tarmac to regional oversight
The regional view, tracking ballast status across every station and hub. Before this system, this level of visibility didn't exist
The Challenge
Before this platform, ballast tracking at United ran on email threads and clipboards on the tarmac. There was no single source of truth, a ballast moved, got miscounted, or went missing, and the system had no way of knowing until someone noticed it was gone. At roughly $75 to replace a single ballast, and United losing 5 to 10 a day, that gap was costing the company an estimated $11,000 to $22,000 a month, on top of the operational risk of inaccurate weight data.
The Station Manager's mobile dashboard, designed for someone standing on the tarmac, not sitting at a desk.
The Decision
The entire process had been designed around one assumption: whoever used it would be sitting at a desk. Tarmac workers weren't. They were standing on the runway, physically moving ballasts, with no time or ability to log into a desktop system between tasks.
I pushed for mobile to be treated as a first-class part of the product, not an afterthought bolted onto the desktop experience later. That meant designing two genuinely different interfaces from the start: a mobile experience built around speed and simplicity for the field, and desktop dashboards built around oversight and coordination for hub and regional managers, both pulling from the same underlying data
The Station Manager's inventory view, one of several role-specific screens shaped directly by early research into how each user actually worked.
What the Research Found
Early in the process, we went through each user role individually to understand what they actually needed before wireframing anything. That's where the mobile requirement surfaced, tarmac workers wouldn't reliably be near a computer during their shift, which meant a desktop-only design would fail the exact people doing the physical work the system depended on. Once we confirmed that, we did additional research into how airports actually operate day to day, so the mobile experience could be designed around real tarmac workflows from the start, rather than mobile being retrofitted after the fact.
The United Airlines Load Planner Tool, synced with ballast data so pilots and maintenance teams always have accurate weight numbers.
Designing for Every Role
Ballast data doesn't mean the same thing to every person who touches it. A tarmac worker needs to know what to load. A pilot and maintenance team need accurate weight data for fuel and safety calculations. A hub manager needs to see inventory across an entire region. Rather than building separate, disconnected tools, I designed this system to integrate directly with United's existing Load Planner Tool, syncing ballast weight data so pilots and maintenance teams could pull accurate numbers without re-entering anything, while tarmac workers, hub managers, and regional admins all worked from that same synced data in views built for their specific role.
Flight status and alerts feeding directly into ballast planning, part of the connected system that replaced manual tracking.
Engineering, product management, UX researchers, and station and hub managers across multiple United airport locations, coordinating field research, cross-platform design, and data integration with United's existing tools
Impact
Cut manual entry errors by 40% by replacing email and clipboard tracking with one connected system
Designed for 5 distinct user roles, from tarmac workers to regional administrators
Delivered 8 dashboards and 3 mobile interfaces from a single shared design system
Integrated with United's existing Load Planner Tool, syncing ballast weight data across teams
Reduced ballast loss and replacement costs, at an estimated $75 per ballast, by replacing manual tracking with real-time inventory visibility