Setting standards for drone training

Client

Garuda Robotics

Drone startup

Timeframe

6 months to MVP launch in Q3 2020

Team

1 Designer (me), 3 Engineers (🇮🇩 & 🇵🇭), 1 Marketing Executive, 1 Head of Training

With the launch of the new UA (unmanned aircraft) training and licensing framework in Singapore, drone users are urgently seeking to obtain an UA pilot license from CAAS-approved UA Training and Assessment Organisation (UATO) in 9 months before regulations are enforced.

This means that there would be an influx of drone users urgently seeking to obtain an UA pilot license in response to the implementation of new UA regulations.

Our training system was not designed to handle a surge in the number of customers who looked to us for training.

Without a digital infrastructure to scale training operations, we’d miss a time-sensitive business opportunity to lead the market and comply with new aviation standards. Internally, it meant rethinking not just the product, but the entire service delivery model.

Tight regulatory timelines set by government rollout of licensing

Limited manpower to develop and launch a highly polished app

Diverse user journeys spanning individual and enterprise training

Business priority: Move from paper-based operation into a digital-first education provider.

Provide a full learning experience by centralizing everything from course registration to assessment — and each step in between, including flexible class management, intuitive grading workflows, and effective progress tracking.

The team's efforts paid off as CAAS chose us to be Singapore's first CAAS-approved UATO!

Accounted for 30% of the company’s sales revenue 6 months after launch.

Reduced monthly customer enquiries by 10%.

As the sole UI/UX designer, I owned the end-to-end experience—from research to design and launch. I coordinated with leadership and training instructor to align business goals, requirements, and project timeline.

End-to end UX / UI design

Project management

Creation of design system

Prototyping

Email templates

Gather and evaluate user requirements

To understand operational pain points, I talked to our instructors and looked into previous trainees’ sentiment on the existing training programs. We discovered that:

Instructors want information organised and accessible

Trainees desire adaptive training

I mapped out fragmented workflows of existing training system across trainees, instructors, and administrators—revealing systemic inefficiencies where our team spend most of their time with administrative duties like creating invoices, sending reminder text messages, and adjusting schedules to accommodate requests.

With these findings in mind, we pinned down the high-level design principles to guide us.

Less is more: Be lightweight and reliable enough that loading time would not be compromised while outfield.

Tailor to context: Present relevant information that's actionable, offered in the right place at the right time.

A few examples of low-fi and production ready design screens for Course Enrolment page. I analysed the pros and cons of the concepts and conducted usability testing to determine the chosen design.

We quickly learned that all participants preferred Exploration B because they found it easy to reconfirm the course they are purchasing despite the course selection page looking wordy.

I created reusable components to foster a consistent user experience and make it easy to create new screens in the future.

Upon launch of the web app, user growth picked up significantly as class capacity was quickly filled and instructors had to create additional classes to meet the high demands.

Instructors can grade multiple trainees in minutes easily without any papers.

Trainees can book classes on days that worked best for their schedule.

Easily manage trainees, classes, and purchase orders on a single platform.

The outcome of the project has successfully met its goals of delivering training solution that could handle the surge in number of customers, where over 10 large scale companies as clients. Looking back, I should have prioritised the creation of admin dashboard to track key metrics so that it is easier for instructors assess and improve their performance. From this experience, I learned that working in a small cross functional team during COVID-19 and tight timelines was not easy.

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