01
Context
Airbus was in the middle of a £1.5M+ digital transformation of its data-as-a-service platform, serving customers across finance, agriculture, education and public services. Handling that variety of data was complex for product teams and end users alike.
Much of the work was manual. Airbus wanted to cut manual workload and human error, and adopt OpenShift to automate data handling.
02
The problem
When I arrived there was no design practice. Product managers handed requirements straight to developers, so features and journeys looked different from platform to platform and could not scale.
The team was focused on infrastructure and delivery, and stakeholders were initially sceptical about bringing design into an engineering-focused culture. Design had to fit inside their DevOps model rather than sit beside it.
The job was not to hand over a set of designs. It was to build design into how this team already delivered, so it would carry on after I left.
03
What I did
My role
I joined as a consultant from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, embedded in the team.
Design strategist: scoped and planned the design roadmap, practices and framework, and fitted them into the team’s Agile and DevOps environment
Lead designer: ran research, wireframing, prototyping and usability testing end to end
Coach and facilitator: coached UX colleagues, product owners, developers and stakeholders, and ran collaborative design workshops
Fitting design into their model
I worked in three phases.
Pre-work. An impact-mapping workshop with stakeholders and the team to agree goals, actors, impacts and the target outcome before anything was designed.
Six-week residency. Design thinking and Lean UX loops running inside their DevOps and Agile cadence, with a Mobius loop linking discovery to delivery. Every loop followed the same pattern: hypothesis, prototype, user test, change.
Transition. A UX audit with recommendations and a roadmap, so the team could scale the practice themselves.
Search and display results on a map
9 users tested · usability score 4.5
What we assumed: users call the area selector “Extent”.
What users did: they didn’t recognise the term and suggested “Areas of interest”. They also lost time finding unfamiliar country names such as Benin and Kiribati.
What we changed: renamed the control to “Areas of interest” and added auto-search suggestions.
What happened next: the search-and-display-results pattern was copied across other journeys and products, so teams didn’t have to design and test it again each time.
Two more features, tested the same way
Data-layer visibility (5 users, usability score 3.5). We assumed hydrant, vehicle and fire-service availability layers would be easy to understand. Users understood what was available without difficulty.
Data-sharing permissions and admin console (5 users, usability score 4.5). A list of organisations confused users, who asked for something explaining its purpose — so we added that context and A/B tested two layouts. The three admin roles tested as clear.
Embedding a practice, not delivering a design
I won the team over with quick wins rather than argument, and then made education the method. Rather than present findings, I got them doing the work.
Stakeholders sat in on user interviews and took notes. Product owners and developers ran the empathy mapping and used affinity mapping to organise feedback and decide what to change. By the time we reached design changes, the conclusions were theirs, not mine.
04
Outcome
3 MVPs tested and validated in six weeks
50%+ time saved by reusing the search, filter, data-layer and user-journey patterns across other products
Design thinking built into delivery: after six weeks the team was co-designing and gathering user research before building, reducing the risk of building something that wouldn’t scale
11+ people enabled: 5+ engineers, 3+ product owners and 3+ senior stakeholders trained to run Lean UX and design thinking themselves
In research
“We cannot work manually with 3–4 satellites and the jobs cannot be done by 5 operators to share the volume of data.”
After the residency
“First time in my 20 years’ experience I have witnessed business and IT coming together to solve the problems.”
“One takeaway for me was the user experience and the value it brings to the organisation… I will add user experience as an add-on service for our transformation delivery.”
05
What I learned
The most valuable thing I left behind was not a screen. It was a validated pattern the team could reuse, and the habit of testing assumptions before building.
A design practice lasts when the team owns it, and a pattern scales when it has been tested once and can be trusted everywhere else. Users overturned two of our assumptions along the way — and the team learned from watching that happen rather than from being told.