West Star Aviation
West Star Aviation handles complex, high-stakes aircraft maintenance for business aviation clients. When a plane is grounded, every day matters. The people responsible for it need accurate, current information to make fast decisions, and the existing customer portal wasn't giving them that.
ROLE
PROBLEM
Both clients and internal staff had stopped trusting the portal. Instead of using it, people were managing project updates over email and phone. Communication was fragmented, decisions were slow, and clients had little confidence in what they were seeing online.
RESULTS
Increased trust in the platform as the primary communication channel.
Reduced dependency on email and phone updates.
Improved decision speed by making trade-offs clear and actionable.
Gave clients greater confidence and transparency throughout the repair process.
The Challenge
Aircraft maintenance projects are messy by nature. Scopes change mid-project, costs need sign-off, and timelines shift. The old portal couldn't keep up with any of that. Status was hard to find and often out of date, key decisions were spread across email threads and spreadsheets, and the UI wasn't built for quick scanning. Clients had learned not to trust it, so they just called instead. That put pressure on both sides and slowed everything down.
My Role & Approach
I worked with stakeholders, engineers, and aviation domain experts on the redesign. The biggest challenge wasn't visual, it was trust. Clients had stopped believing the portal reflected reality, so the first priority was designing a system where status, decisions, and updates stayed current and lived in one place.
From there, I focused on making that information fast to act on. I designed dashboard views that gave clients a clear read on project health across multiple aircraft without needing to dig, with costs, approvals, and schedule impacts surfaced clearly rather than buried. I also built messaging into the platform itself, so conversations stayed tied to the relevant project context rather than spilling out into email.
Throughout the project I ran workshops with both internal staff and clients to make sure what we were building actually matched how they worked, not just how we assumed they worked.
Outcome
By the end of the project, the portal was the primary place people went for project information rather than the last resort. Clients stopped calling for updates they could now find themselves, and internal teams spent less time fielding those calls.