CAE Inc. · UI Design | Product Design · 2021–2023
Crew Training
Crew Training is a mobile-first study platform built for pilots, combining three separate apps into one. It gives CAE trainees comprehensive courses, interactive learning, and progress tracking — plus easy access to study materials, schedules, past records, and training check-in.
- Role
- UI Design | Product Design
- Time
- 2021–2023
- With
- CAE Inc.
Ingredients
- UI Design
- Product Design
Some pilots log in for a single week every six months, while cadets use the app daily for an entire year.
Context
CAE Inc. is a Canadian manufacturer of simulation technology with a strong focus on aviation, offering both simulation solutions and pilot training worldwide. Crew Training is the digital bridge between pilots-in-training and their training centers. Before 2020, different user groups relied on different apps entirely. To reduce friction — for both CAE's customer care team and its users — everything was unified into a single app covering books, schedules, training records, and computer-based learning.
Personas
Cadet, FTO · Age 22
Charlie Tope
A passionate aviation enthusiast just starting out, Charlie is enrolled at CAE and uses the app to read his coursebooks, take notes, and study for exams. With a year-long training path ahead of him, he needs interactive, comprehensive courses that build both the theory and the practical skills a flying career demands.
Civil Aviation Pilot, CAT · Age 35
Sara Wright
Sara is an experienced commercial pilot flying internationally for a major airline. She turns to CAE for recurrent training whenever her own company can't provide it, and relies on the app to stay organized across her schedule and simulator sessions.
Business Aviation Pilot, BAT · Age 55
Alex Johnson
Alex flies private jets for high-profile clients with demanding, ever-changing schedules. He depends on the app to access training materials on the go, and chose CAE for its flexibility and customer service. He uses the app to keep pace with both his training and his calendar.
Problem — Part 1
I joined CAE and the Crew Training team in September 2021. At the time, Crew Training was the company's only iOS app — and a fairly limited one. Users could view schedules, read a few books, and take notes, but the app's biggest gaps were the lack of a proper calendar and any real navigation structure.
Approach
Once I started sitting in on dailies with the developers and product owner, I noticed customer survey results came up constantly — including one question asking users if they'd be open to a follow-up interview. The product owner and I used those responses to reach out directly, and ran a series of informal one-on-one interviews.
Pre-Training Experience Flow
During this phase, I mapped the full pre-training experience to identify every point of contact between CAE and its users, and to highlight how much the schedule and reminder system mattered to them.
Solution
These conversations revealed two very different problems. Our Business (BAT) users struggled most with scheduling — they could see individual reservations, but had no unified calendar view of all their sessions. Our Cadets (FTO), meanwhile, weren't bothered by the calendar at all — their pain point was the card view. FTO students train with CAE for up to two years and can end up with as many as sixteen active reservation cards at once. Because those cards were sorted chronologically, and many shared the same end date, the system struggled to organize them in a way that made sense.
So our first move was giving FTO users the ability to pin content in the order that matched how they actually studied, making navigation far easier. We also added a calendar widget to the home screen for BAT customers, so their full schedule was visible at a glance.
Slide 1 of 2
Problem — Part 2
As the project progressed and our first updates rolled out, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) improved — but not enough. Users still described friction around finding and accessing their materials. Long-time users, especially Cadets, were still fighting the sideways navigation, and it showed clearly in their scores, which remained the lowest of any user group.
Approach
The clear next step was a full app redesign — one focused on usability and built around a more modern design system. A core part of that redesign was rethinking how content was visualized, so every feature felt like part of one coherent experience. Alongside that, the team prioritized paying down technical debt and optimizing the codebase for better performance and stability.
Slide 1 of 3
Solution
As part of this redesign, the CAE Product Design team rolled out a new design system, with Crew Training as its first application. We introduced a search bar, filtering options, and the choice between list and card views to make content far easier to navigate.
We also added a schedule notification system to alert users the moment something changed last-minute. Behind the scenes, technical debt was cut by more than half, and — based on direct user feedback — we removed several third-party dependencies, meaningfully improving the experience for pilots accessing their books.
Outcomes
After these changes, the app's CSAT score rose from 2.7 to 3.5, crashes dropped by more than half, and the user base grew by 75%.
In 2024, Crew Training received the Best Digital Transformation award at the United States Customer Experience Awards, a national competition recognizing excellence in customer experience.
Reflections
Crew Training serves a genuinely unusual mix of users — some pilots log in for a single week every six months, while cadets use the app daily for an entire year. Add in a wide age range with very different comfort levels around technology, and every new feature has to be introduced carefully. We keep a close eye on usage data and customer surveys to see what's working and what still isn't solving the problem it was meant to.
There's still more to do. Over the past few months I've worked closely with developers to make our content library more flexible and user-friendly — since our last integration, the number of available books has tripled, and we're continuing to adapt the library to what trainees actually need.