Crew Compensation

TL;DR

The solution in all its forms

Crew compensation is an auditing platform to make sure flight staff is paid correctly.

Crew Comp: Cloud

You can think of this as the 'face' of Crew Comp.

Crew Comp: Automation

These relate to complicated, automatically generated reports.

Overview

Airlines process complex compensation structures for pilots and flight attendants, factoring in flight hours, delays, overtime, and union rules. The 'Crew Compensation' products ensure that flight crew is paid correctly.

Stephanie Richard-Obire

Director, Crew Schedule Planning

"Your designs and inputs have added so much more magnitude to the application. I love the way you translate the inputs/requirements into visuals and each time I see new visuals, I am amazed. Appreciate those live feedback and comments you attest to the visuals during review meetings. You take feedback and critics positively and always so patient with teammates throwing in all their ideas and suggestions. There is definitely so much more to come in the future and I am excited when we go live with FAPP where we will have more users using this application outside CrewComp. I am so glad to be working with you on the team!"

Mukesh BhaBootmal Kahtri

Manager, IT Applications

Becky Sherman

Director of UX

"Huge props for all your hustle around CME. I appreciate your ability to navigate the ambiguity and still crank out amazing 🤩

Thank you for all you do!"

The Challenge

Crew Comp Sucks.

Payroll analysts struggled with outdated, manual auditing tools that led to frequent errors, delays in pay corrections, and frustration from crew members.

Analysts had to juggle multiple disconnected systems

Manual auditing was time-consuming and error-prone

Lack of clear data visualization made tracking errors difficult

Constraints & Considerations:

• Compliance with complex airline union agreements
• Integration with legacy payroll systems
• Must accommodate different airline pay structures

From Research to Implementation

I periodically shadowed analysts, and relied on crew comp managers to relay their team's performance while I focused on instilling a design process within the team.

Analysts spent ~50% of their time cross-checking data across multiple tools

Stakeholder Mapping

This was most of the team's first time working with a designer so establishing the right relationship was crucial to instilling a design process.

Rose, Bud, Thorns

My primary focus was to deliver effective solutions in a way that respected the creative input of the developers and helped prioritize those efforts.

Lack of clear audit trails made it hard to verify past changes

Analysts wanted searchable historical records for quicker resolutions

Design Approach

My aim was to keep things visually simple and focus on simplifying workflows by consolidating tools, improving transparency in pay calculations, and enabling faster error detection with visual cues.

Exploring concepts with the team

I made sure to leverage the team's frustrations and enthusiasm for how they best saw this product play out as a way to learn more about the airline industry while giving them the floor to express their qualms.

"O you want to do that? Great! This is the design cost."

Picking battles with renegade POs

Y'all know what these fights are like. In this particular scenario, the PO was an exceptionally knowledgable subject matter expert who had huge super saiyan 3 levels of reservations regarding visual design changes.

So, what did I do? I fought the good fight as long as I could. I won some, lost some more - we built a mutual respect this way.

Introducing form validation

Not particularly revolutionary, but extremely important because: 1.4,1.40,1.04, 1hr 4min -all mean different things.

Designing an Intuitive Auditing Tool for Airline Payroll Accuracy