Analyzing Requirements for and Designing a Collaborative Tool based on Functional and User Input

In flightline maintenance, collaboration is an important factor in the maintainer’s quest to complete a difficult or unusual repair. Technology provides a multitude of potential collaborative tools and techniques, and this must be balanced against the requirement to leverage and/or support maintainers’ existing interaction skills, rather than requiring them to adapt to the technology. This paper discusses the definition of collaboration, a high-level classification of collaboration types, followed by a discussion of the strategy used by the Aircraft Maintenance Intuitive Troubleshooting (AMIT) research project design team to determine the appropriate collaboration tools for the AMIT job aide. In general, this strategy utilized a blend of research and user feedback, balanced by end use environment constraints and requirements, to create a usable and useful collaboration capability for the Air Force maintenance technician.