The Bush Pilot's Guide to UX Design

Lesson #7: Don't complain about irrelevant issues when the real problem is core functionality.

Greg was Polar Bear Airway’s dispatcher in Frobisher Bay. Greg was a rugged single man in his early thirties and he had a habit of pulling at his thick ragged beard when he was stressing. He worked out of a small office in front of Polar Bear’s hanger at the civilized end of Frobisher Bay’s main runway. Greg’s job was to make sure Polar Bear’s clients weren’t complaining; the oil exploration companies, the academic and government research groups, and whoever else needed to be flown to and retrieved from remote locations across Canada’s great white north. Greg’s job was never easy. It was mosquito season 1974, and despite the above-zero weather, today was not going well at all.

At the heart of Greg’s problem today was an overdue airplane; a Twin Otter. I was enjoying some discussion with Greg about important topics; new female staff at the hospital and such, but I could tell that Greg was increasingly distracted by the overdue aircraft and its two-man crew: Lorne and Sean. Sean was the co-pilot and he was a buddy of mine so I shared some light concern with Greg, but to be honest, both Lorne and Sean seemed indestructible so I wasn’t too worried.

The Captain, Lorne was actually a legend of sorts. He wasn’t a fabled arctic pilot in the normal sense; his renown came from a jaw-dropping history of spectacular aircraft accidents – accidents which he always walked away from. It was rumored that Lorne’s name had been adopted into the taxonomy of big-city aircraft insurers, as in:

“I could insure Polar Bear Lorne easier than I could insure that guy!”

Lorne had become an established standard of measurement for poor judgement. Yet Polar Bear Airways continued to employ him as a pilot. Note: Lorne was the nephew of the founder of Polar Bear Airways; perhaps this accounted for our employer’s unusual patience for the astonishing trail of bent and twisted aluminum always in his wake. In fact Polar Bear’s chief pilot had quietly mentored me a few months earlier:

“Whatever Lorne does: Never do that.”

Lorne and Sean were supposed to have returned a couple of hours ago from a short charter to Lake Harbour, a small Inuit village about a hundred miles west of Frobisher Bay. Of course we were all concerned for their safety but there were compelling business needs as well: Another customer was waiting to be flown to Pond Inlet, a long and lucrative charter that was being jeopardized by Lorne’s mysterious absence. All of us in the dispatch office could hear both sides of all the radio conversations as Greg made the standard radio calls on the company’s assigned HF radio channel, talking to lots of other pilots, but never reaching Lorne and Sean. Now Greg was calling the nursing station in Lake Harbour.

Luck! The community nurse just happened to be sitting right beside the radiotelephone in her little hut. Even more surprising was that when Greg asked her if she had seen or heard anything of the missing Twin Otter, she replied that yes she had and would Greg like to speak with the co-pilot because he was right there in the nursing station with her!

Greg:

“Hi Sean. Why aren’t you back in Frobisher? Your Pond Inlet customers are waiting…”

Sean replied in a weirdly high-pitched and strangely upbeat voice:

“Oh yah, hi Greg! How’re things going?”

Greg was in no mood for pleasantries.

“You guys need to get back here.”

Sean seemed nervous:

“Heh heh, yah. Well we have a little problem with the airplane, but we’re working on it and we should have it fixed up soon.”

Greg took this information in and digested it. He waited. His reply was slow and measured, deliberately void of the normal bush pilot expletives, but the universal adjectives were still there between the words, if you knew Greg:

“What’s. Wrong. With. The. Aircraft. Sean?”

Sean took a while to reply. This was uncharacteristic of Sean; he was a snappy, quick-witted twenty-six year-old and he never hesitated at anything. Finally, we heard Sean’s stumbling answer:

“Ahhhhh. We’re having some trouble getting it fired up. You know – getting it started.”

Greg:

“What’s the problem?”

Sean:

“Hard to say. Maybe the battery. We’re working on it right now.”

Greg was quiet for a few seconds. Then:

“Do you need me to send you some parts? A new battery?”

Sean was quick:

“No! No, no. No need for help quite yet. Lorne thinks we’ll be ready to go soon.”

Greg:

“Sean, what the hell is going on? Let me speak to Lorne.”

Sean:

“Lorne’s busy rounding up some local help…” Then, realizing he might have slipped up a little:

“Lorne’s not here. He’s working the problem. I should get back there too – help him.”

Greg was losing his patience:

“Rounding up some local help? Sean, what’s going on…? Just tell me what’s going on!”

We could all hear Sean over the HF radio, struggling with his words. His detached voice was mixed with the strange other-worldly effects that come with high-frequency band communications: The distant slow background sirens, whining up and then descending back down, the ethereal Morse code drifting into the audio landscape from adjacent frequencies, and the alien clicks and clacks that one could imagine coming from beyond the solar system. We could sense internal struggle as Sean spoke these next few words:

“Unhhh… we’re… having trouble starting… “

“We can’t start it because…”

“Oh… damn it…”

Sean paused and then seemed to give up:

“Greg, we can’t start it because the airplane is upside down in the lake.”

Later, when the whole story had fully unfolded, it turned out that Captain Lorne had generously decided to give flying lessons to a couple of attractive nurses earlier that day. Fun! Except the gravel runway at Lake Harbour was extremely narrow, short and ended at the edge of a cliff that dropped vertically into a lake. The Twin Otter is not an ideal airplane for beginners; it’s tricky to steer on the ground and it would be an expensive trainer, if anyone were keeping track of training expenses.

Not being content with showing the nurses how to do safe, gentle turns at a respectably high altitude, Lorne thought it would be much more interesting to let the nurses practice how to land a hard-to-steer, multi-turbine-engine transport aircraft on a very short, precariously narrow, dirt runway with a cliff and a water obstacle at one end. It was another important practical lesson for the rest of us: What to never do.

Bush Pilot Design Tip #7:

Don’t solve for starting the engine when the entire airplane is upside down in the lake.

A while ago, prior to my current employer, I had a conversation with a UX designer friend and co-worker. We had both just finished a grueling day of attempting to use some of our own software to do things that the software was intended for. Even though we were following a carefully prepared script and even though highly skilled facilitators were helping us, none of us were able to finish our assigned tasks. My friend remarked:

“What must it be like to be one of our paying customers?”

Indeed, I thought. Then she continued:

“Yesterday we had a big meeting and for fifteen minutes we discussed an issue about color themes in our product. Hard to believe when there are such terrible problems with our core functionality.”

It was a good reminder for me. Sometimes it's tempting to be like my Polar Bear Airways buddy Sean; allowing oneself to raise issues about irrelevant problems, when the real and terrible problem is core functionality.

If you want to be relevant as a UX designer, get good at writing up software bugs, and follow up to make certain those bugs are being addressed. Harping about subtle color choices when core features are fundamentally broken is a certain pathway to irrelevance.

Dave

Before I became a UX designer I was a development manager, a solo developer, an Air Canada captain, and before that I was a bush pilot in the Canadian arctic, Greenland and the Antarctic. I've been writing up design lessons I learned from those early days in the ice and snow.