Jeppesen publishes flight charts for commercial and private pilots in the United States. For a long time, they owned the market for this information. Flight navigation data is largely public, but Jeppesen added a lot of value in how they presented it. Competing with Jeppesen meant creating custom printing equipment and even your own paper. Not something most start-up companies could afford to do.

But electronic mapping changed that. The cost barrier began to fall, and competition became real. Jeppesen saw their market shift and projected losing as much as 30% of their business in the coming decade, unless they did something. Just digitizing navigation charts wouldn’t be enough. How would Jeppesen make a product that could be used the way pilots needed and wanted to use it? To learn more about how pilots get and use navigation charts, we talked to pilots and observed how they prepared for flights.

We saw them working with bulky binders filled with flight charts. About once a month, revised charts arrived for review and approval. Once that was done, pilots had to pull and replace old charts with the approved updates. We discovered FAA and airline regulations that would affect design choices. Although electronic flight information can be loaded at any time or place, regulations required a person to physically carry flight charts onto a plane.

We heard frustration about Jeppesen’s rigid publication options. Many pilots may only need charts for a few places but would have to buy everything for the eastern, western, or entire United States. Electronic chart products would allow more flexibility and choice, but we also worked through pricing models to show how Jeppesen could shift to a digital delivery model without losing anything.

In the end, we designed a prototype for a product that allowed pilots to buy only the charts they needed and carry them on using an electronic flight bag. We also created an approval and update process for flight charts that focused on ease of use over efficiency, noting that pilots don’t do this often enough to be able to remember it each time. The electronic charting software included ways for third-party vendors to add on useful features, like automatic tire pressure readings.