MxHub — empowering aircraft technicians and automating maintenance for Alaska Airlines.

• Tools & processes

  Workflows scattered across tools

  No shared data layer, and no shared vocabulary. Every tool had its own login, its own load time, and its own update cycle. The same work looked different in each one, and which channel carried it — screen, radio, paper — changed by station and by shift.

• Locations & climate

  14 stations, every climate

  14 stations across the network, from Anchorage to Honolulu, each with its own workflows, team sizes, and capabilities. The same UI had to work in -40°F winter gloves, in 120°F summer glare, and over whatever connectivity the ramp happened to offer.

• Shifts & stakeholders

  Thousands of workers, no single view

  Three daily shifts of technicians, plus Leads coordinating the floor and Mx Control dispatching from a central operations hub — across two carriers, Alaska and Horizon, each with its own systems and certification rules. Every role worked in different tools and needed different things at handoff, so miscommunication was baked into the workflow.

• Challenges & constraints

  Union rules, long habits, a hard deadline

  Union agreements governed how work could be assigned, and to whom. Many technicians were long-tenured, with mental models built over years around the paper process. And the legacy tools were sunsetting in under 12 months — there was no option to iterate indefinitely.

Research

Understanding our users.

To build a comprehensive solution, I first had to understand the pain points and complexity of aircraft maintenance, and the stakeholders who keep it running. That meant collecting a lot of data: shadowing technicians and Leads at various stations, conducting interviews, sending out surveys and working with beta users — and mapping every supporting tool to find the systemic gaps, redundancies and opportunities.

• Behavioural observation

  Shadowed techs, Leads, and Mx Control across shifts and stations.

• Interviews

  One-on-one with techs, Leads, Mx Control, Engineering, and Parts.

• Anonymous surveys

  Anonymous, so technicians could answer honestly without being identified.

• Competitive analysis

  AirExpert (Horizon's tool) and task-management apps that informed the IA.

• Fake “unscheduled MX” entries as shift notes

  No field existed for shift-to-shift notes, so techs filed non-defects in TRAX for the next shift to read. Real defects mixed with shift gossip in Mx Control's queue.

• The same defect entered three times

  Open it in LineOps. Write it in the paper logbook. Transcribe it into TRAX at end of shift. One chance per system to fat-finger the tail number.

• A roster that broke the moment anything changed

  The crew board lived on the wall and was re-printed by hand at every shift change. Certifications came from three separate sources — per tech, every assignment.

Primary user persona

Eric Gregson

Age

54

Seniority

24 years

Title

Aircraft Technician

Priority

Safety

An experienced aircraft mechanic, Eric takes pride in his work and puts safety above all else. He feels pressured by management to work quickly, and is sometimes frustrated by the constant communication across different channels. He's open to new tools if they're easy to use — but prefers old solutions and pen and paper.

Scroll sideways to see the full shift →

Why safety is the priority. Safety here is personal liability. A technician signs off on work that keeps an aircraft in the air, and can be held accountable if it is wrong.

• Mx Control

  Ultimate authority on MX

  The technician's main resource when troubleshooting stalls, and the approval on the fix.

• Parts Department

  Inventory, stock, tooling

  The source of the tools, parts and equipment a fix depends on.

• Flight Crew

  Cabin + cockpit, departure-side

  Usually the first to report an unscheduled fault, and the most exposed to the delay that follows.

• Gate Agents · Customer Service

  Passenger experience

  Where a delay turns into a customer problem — the bridge between maintenance and users.

• Station Manager

  Station-level oversight

  The aggregate picture — how many aircraft are out of service, and where the bottlenecks are.

• Air Traffic Control

  Downstream operations

  Delays, gate changes and aircraft swaps, which ripple through the rest of the day's schedule.

1— jump to Sidebar menu with single sign-on2— jump to Responsive grid built for iOS Dynamic Type3— jump to Personalised saved filters

• 1

  Sidebar menu with single sign-on

  Fingerprint into MxHub, then one tap to any other tool — no re-authentication, no password resets. As MxHub absorbed each legacy tool, its sidebar item retired with it.

• 2

  Responsive grid built for iOS Dynamic Type

  With the population skewing 50+, large-text support was a layout requirement rather than an afterthought. The grid was tested at the largest setting first.

• 3

  Personalised saved filters

  Each user pinned the filters matching their work — My Assigned, All Station, ETOPS, or a custom combination. The list adapts to whoever opens it.

• Every issue on one screen, ranked

  LineOps gave a lineup you clicked into one issue at a time — no overview, no hierarchy. This shows every issue on the tail at once, ordered by what blocks the next departure.

• Split-screen, borrowed from email

  See the whole list while working a single issue — the pattern people already know from mail and task apps. It also reflows better at large text sizes than a nested drill-down would.

• The manual comes to the issue

  Relevant maintenance-manual sections are pulled in by ATA chapter — no separate app, no searching. Photos, attachments, comments and @mentions all attach to that issue.

• An advocate user group gave rapid feedback in Teams
• Prototype testing across roles and stations
• Early testers became champions for adoption

SUS rating out of 100 — Grade B

76.38

CSAT rating out of 100 — “Good”

78.3

Two measures, deliberately: SUS scores usability, CSAT scores satisfaction. The 78% in the opening is this CSAT figure.

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