Notifly was built for the people living around Schiphol. Many neighbours have complained about the noise from planes flying over their homes. From several interviews, one main frustration stood out, people didn’t know when planes would be flying over their houses. To address that, Schiphol created this app. As the digital team, we can’t reduce the number of flights or change their routes, but we can make things more predictable and transparent.
Most of the features were data-driven and required close collaboration with our data scientists. They eventually created a grid system around Schiphol to map where airplanes cause noise. Using that, the app can predict how many planes will fly “over” a user’s house based on their location.
Prediction per hour
Besides the graph at the top of the page, we also provide a more detailed prediction showing which runways the planes will depart from or arrive on. People living around Schiphol know this topic inside out, they understand exactly how much noise impact each runway can have.
There’s an interactive map where people can see live airplane locations for both departing and arriving flights. We used different colors to show the difference between them, and the runways are color-coded the same way.
Many people also like to check which plane just flew over their house, as a confirmation, especially if it was a noisy one. To make that possible, we added a time scrubber so users can go back in time and view historical flight locations.
Interactive map
When you tap on a plane, you’ll see detailed information about it. The noise level depends on several factors, like the plane’s speed, altitude, size, and whether it’s a passenger or cargo flight. We reused the airplane illustration from the Schiphol app, and the background gradient changes throughout the day to match the sky outside.
Airplane details
I joined the project after the initial research and concept phase, once the app was live and part of our digital department. Since I was also designing for the Schiphol app, I took Notifly under my wing. Over time, we improved features based on user feedback and refined the design system.
There was an internal need for a custom CMS for the Notifly app, so colleagues could maintain the content and send notifications to users by zip code whenever there was upcoming maintenance on the runways.
Zipcode areas based on runways
Creating a notification
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