Case study

Percepto AIM — Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring

Mission-critical UX for enterprise drone operations.

Enterprise UX Safety-Critical IoT B2B SaaS User Research

Percepto AIM pre-launch checklist and spinner redesign

34s→<8s

Spinner wait

Product tracks

Phase process

FedEx, FPL, Delek

Enterprise clients

Context

Embedded with the AIM product team

My role

Product Designer — embedded with AIM product team

Company

Percepto

Team size

Cross-functional product squad (PM, eng, QA)

Segment

Enterprise B2B — Energy, Security, Infrastructure

Timeline

2021–2022

Users

Site operations engineers, field technicians

Platforms

Web app (primary) + Mobile

Tools

Figma, FullStory, Power BI, quarterly surveys

Discovery evidence

Defining the problem from what customers actually hit in preflight

Before prioritizing UX work, I paired operational data with field interviews. Power BI preflight reports showed which technical failures dominated real launches — so we understood where risk concentrated for operators (e.g. heading, GPS, sensor checks), not only what felt slow in the UI. That grounded problem definition in customer behavior and failure frequency, not generic “bad UX.”

Power BI preflight report: bar chart of preflight error categories and frequencies, including wrong heading, low GPS, and landing camera failure — Preflight report (Power BI): distribution of preflight errors from the field — used with teams to align on which failures were systemic, how often they occurred, and why “wait and spinner” moments were high-stakes for trust and launch continuity.

Qualitative synthesis

Empathy maps after each interview — building the persona from evidence

After each session with operators (e.g. OGI / inspection personas), I captured Says · Thinks · Does · Feels in a shared empathy map. Patterns like low confidence in automation, need for clear leak definitions, and tension between speed vs. not missing leaks fed mission authoring, launch clarity, and compliance flows — including how much explanation the UI owes the operator under stress.

Empathy map for OGI operator: Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels quadrants with sticky-note insights — Example synthesis: OGI operator empathy map — aggregated notes from interviews into observable behaviors and emotional risk (trust, fear of missing leaks), then used to stress-test flows and wording with PM and Engineering.

Problem

“A wrong tap can halt a drone mid-mission.”

AIM automates drone inspection for industrial sites. The UX consequences of poor design weren’t frustration — they were grounded fleets and compliance incidents.

Black box spinner

Operators watched a generic loading animation. Pre-arm failures surfaced at takeoff — after they’d already committed to launch.

Fragile compliance flow

Remote ID (FAA) required a cross-device, multi-step journey that was easy to fail under field pressure.

Mission creation complexity

RGB, thermal, and OGI configurations created high cognitive load for engineers working outdoors.

My role & leadership

Research, systems thinking, and documented handoff

What I owned

Full UX lifecycle across three tracks: mission launch reliability, FAA compliance (Remote ID), and autonomous mission creation. Mixed methods: FullStory, Power BI preflight analytics, quarterly surveys, and direct interviews with enterprise operators.

How I partnered

Worked across product, engineering, and QA on three concurrent tracks — documenting 30+ screen states in Figma per track, organized by user type, mission type, and interaction state.

Process

Discovery through disciplined handoff

Discovery

Five survey rounds, FullStory across FedEx-scale accounts, Power BI preflight failures, and a Tesla Berlin field interview to rank failure modes.

Ideation

Three complete Remote ID architectures mapped end-to-end; spinner patterns benchmarked against IoT setup and aviation checklists.

Solution

High-fidelity Figma in AIM’s dark language, scored on value, viability, usability, and feasibility before build.

Testing

Operator prototypes pre-engineering; Remote ID exercised on hardware in outdoor-simulated conditions.

Hand-off

30+ documented states per track — user type, mission type, interaction state — for engineering and QA.

Key design decisions

Design for operators who launch every day

Real-time checklist vs. improved progress bar

Options: Prettier spinner · % bar · Live checklist

Chosen: Real-time checklist — each system check with pending / in-progress / complete states beside a drone visual.

Expert users need the right information, organized clearly — not less information.

Moving pre-arm checks earlier

Options: Keep at takeoff · Log after launch · Move to initialization

Chosen: Move checks to mission initialization — engineering relocated preArmChecks to mission creation.

Power BI showed failures after users had mentally committed. Surface problems when operators can still act.

Progressive disclosure for multi-camera missions

Options: All cameras at once · Separate flows per camera · Progressive disclosure

Chosen: One camera panel default, “+ Add instruction” reveals additional configurations.

Research showed one camera type per mission was the norm — default complexity had no upside.

Visuals

Checklists, compliance, and mission authoring

Real-time launch checklist Every pre-arm step visible before operators commit.

Camera sequencing Progressive disclosure for RGB, thermal, and OGI.

Mission bank Drag, edit, and review with operator guardrails.

Outcomes

Measured wait times and shipped compliance

34s → <8s

Avg spinner wait

Checklist UX replaced the black-box wait state.

Before: 34 sec

After: <8 sec

Parallel tracks

Launch · Remote ID · Mission Creation.

30+

Figma states

Quick Launch redesign alone — documented for eng + QA.

FedEx · FPL · Delek

Enterprise clients shipped to

Mission-critical flows deployed across regulated operators.

Remote ID shipped to meet FAA requirements in regulated airspace. Mission creation rolled out across FedEx, FPL, Delek, OGI, and PGE. The component library and documentation process became the default for how AIM ships complex flows.

Reflection

What enterprise drone UX taught me

“Regulatory UX is a design discipline.” Remote ID began as compliance and became a product challenge: make a mandatory, cross-device flow legible, fast, and trustworthy.

“Expert users need the right information, not less.” The checklist worked because it respected operators as skilled professionals.

“Data and empathy together.” FullStory flagged the spinner; the Tesla field interview explained what it felt like on a rooftop in Berlin.