When the tools behind Europe's airspace get a redesign, there is no room to get it wrong.
EUROCONTROL coordinates air traffic management across Europe. Airline operators, flow managers and flight planners rely on its tools to manage capacity and flight operations every day. As part of the n-CONECT programme, EUROCONTROL set out to replace several legacy desktop applications with modern browser-based interfaces. We helped design the new tools for the people who would use them.
The challenge
EUROCONTROL's tools support some of the most high-stakes operational work in Europe. Many thousands of flights, managed in real time, with zero tolerance for confusion at the interface level.
The legacy applications had served that purpose for years, but the technology was reaching end of life. The question was how to redesign interfaces for users who had built deep muscle memory around the existing system, worked under constant time pressure and relied on every pixel of information on screen.
Each user group operated differently. Airline operators managed flight-level data. Flow managers balanced capacity across sectors. Flight planners worked through dense planning workflows with strict constraints. A single generic interface would serve none of them well.
The solution
We designed browser-based interfaces for three core applications, each tailored to its user group while sharing a consistent design language across the programme.
The work went deeper than screens. For each application, we mapped how users actually worked through field studies, observation sessions and expert interviews, then redesigned the workflows around what mattered most in their daily tasks. For the Flight application, that meant streamlining how airline operators access and manage flight data. For the Flow application, it meant supporting how flow managers understand and manage capacity. For the IFPS application, it meant rethinking how flight planners navigate complex planning scenarios.
Alongside the individual applications, we established shared HMI principles so the interface ecosystem stays consistent as more applications move to the new platform.
The approach
The work started in the field. We spent time with airline operators, flow managers and flight planning teams to understand how they actually use the current tools, where they work around limitations, and what they cannot afford to lose in a transition.
From those insights, the team developed future-state scenarios and conceptual designs, tested them through prototyping and formal user testing, and refined them in close collaboration with product owners, analysts and developers. Every design decision was validated against operational reality before it moved into specification.
The project ran over several years as an embedded collaboration with EUROCONTROL teams, combining continuous user feedback with the detailed interface specifications needed to support a transition of this scale.
