BT
CI&T
Design Director & Lead Designer
Design direction
UX/UI design
Interaction design
Workshops
Prototyping
We intergrated with BT's Drone Solutions team, tasked to deliver the goal of creating a platform that would serve as the basis for BT’s drone ambitions.
The global drone industry is projected to be worth 54B by 2030, and there are clear synergies thanks to BT’s experience in telecommunications.
Over the course of the project, we helped build an internal product team working on near and far solutions as well as shaping the ever changing landscape and regulations with our Drone Collective squad of industry leaders.
To conceptualise and create a comprehensive platform that could serve as the foundation for BT's diverse drone ambitions in a regulated industry. One that was not only for BT's internal team, but could be a 'one stop shop' for drone users to manage equipment and missions in a competitive market, looking at innovative features and technological advantages we could bring to the table.
We started the project by casting a wide net, looking at what a 'one-stop-shop' could look like. Running a series of ideation and product workshops before mocking up sone initial concepts and direction.
We created a diverse team of testers that were not only the target audience of users but also ranged a vast selection of industries to give us good insight. These industries ranged from hobbiest all the way to the Met Police and Royal Firebrigade.
Testing drove much enthusiasm and as a result we formed a squad called Drone Collective, comprised of those mentioned above who wanted to be very hands on with testing and feature maping. One big thing that came out of these workshops was the need for industry change.
By having some big players like the Met Police alongside BTs name and reputation we could also seek to direct change within the aviation industry for better regulations and control.
With a somewhat double diamond process in place, our regular R&D cycles carried on while seeking to focus on what an MVP could look like, pulling the net of ideas back in to focus on a few core areas such as adding drones and teams to the platform, then carrying out a flight and mission.
This give us strong foundations to build upon and validated the need and use for the product within BT's business division that surveys their pylons and sites regularly.
We broke down the platform into modules that can be released in stages. First was Mission Manager, which was comprised of 4 core areas. Then a two-sided marketplace allowing drone survey job requests to be raised by client organisations of the BT Pilot Services team. Jobs went through a workflow between client and BT Pilot Services keeping all sides informed of progress. The Media storage and processing side allowed pilots to upload drone-captured media from which EXIF data is extracted for core insight e.g. elevation, this was also an area we sought to intergrate with AI to extract key information and smart tagging systems. Lastly a report for the job could be created. Consisting of written results, and media - including standard and thermal images, interactive panorama, and hi-res grids. These replaced very old document styles and allow fast access anywhere, on any device, as well as sharability and even legacy maping over time with this captured data.
The seconded module focused around four core areas bundled as Flight Manager. First was asset management; managing a fleet of drones, where they are located, their flight hours, associated jobs and maintenance schedules. Then was planning tools for pilots to perform situational awareness for the area of a flight e.g. weather prediction, airspace risks and ground risks, adding more value to the platforms core features. And then rolled out through the platform was futher tracking and mitigating risks as part of compliant drone flight planning. Logs were the last core area of this module and a crucial one. Keeping logs for auditability by the CAA regulator is a part of compliance as well as pilot flight hours and incident reports.
