Research airline customer experience
Design a MVP in order to inspire the vision for airline customer experience. The client was looking to create an exceptional customer and passenger experience by leveraging customer data. This would allow them to recognize and respond to customer and passenger predicaments [i.e. cancelled flights and lost baggage], recognize high value passenger moments and tap into market opportunities.

I served as the UX Researcher.
My primary role was Lead UX Designer for this project.
- Designed workshop agenda and research activities
- Wrote interview discussion guide to simulate participant expectations.
- Facilitated activity sessions and probed feedback.
- Wrote the and delivered readouts and outputs.
- Conducted stakeholder interviewed with a lens and grew a picture of the user.
- Built patterns to create insights.
Collaborators
- Project Delivery Lead
- Sr. Business Advisor
Objective
Our objective was to build an inspiring hypotheses that would define roles, and expectations for stakeholders and users’ and prioritize which use cases were going to be most important for capturing the vision of the project. We needed to capture the user experience data and usability problems, in order set expectations for the success of an MVP.
Challenge
We had 3 weeks to plan research activity prior to the start of our prototype design.
This as a brand new initiative at the company, around 1.5 year old. Most of our client product owners inside their first year on the project. The client had more ideas and aspirations than they had definition. The infrastructure for the proof of concept was very immature, poor governance, technology gaps and a culture where UX approach was not in place.
Approach

Semi-weekly standup calls
Our whole working team would gather with the client and the sale team to discuss project progress and clear road blocks.
Outcomes
What is the current user experience of the recognition engine ?
"Currently back office environments has had many thorns. We use Dynamics: Something small as changing the view mode was like "a 2 year ordeal";
Panasonic: I liked the control it gave me, it was very complicated, but the step of pushing the recognition was only done once per month and required the physically sticking a USB stick in on each plane..."
Gamifying incentive is on the radar for adoption
'...where even if we just measured performance and gamified it and said, 'hey, you know, Congrats, you get a special sticker in your employee badge because you are a superstar at recognitions.'
"Like, do you have our conference rooms tap, it sounds like you do. No, I mean, me and Jen are currently in conversations with another product owner, who is trying to get that started."
Cross-divisional passenger experience
"Giving the moment of delight. How do we find a way to show the continuity of that data throughout all of the touch points of airport experience journey? For example passing that warm feeling about a recognition from dropping that bag off to the gate and onto the IFS experience."
Interview Readout
I curated the responses from all 11 interviews into 7 themes to tease out insights.
- Using my storytelling skills & techniques we built a 20 slide summary deck detailing findings, opportunity areas, and observations.
- We found more than 10 recommendations & opportunities to pursue in MVP and beyond.
Workshop Readouts
Following up on workshops, I delivered a summarized recap to translate the insights into actions for design.
The workshop readout was an opportunity to collect client feedback, bring up follow up questions and assign action items, so that the whole process was collaborative. We also addressed feedback during weekly standup meetingsThe plan for the prototype
The design team needed to deliver a prototype for the MVP scope of work. Discovery enabled us design the prototype.
Who is the user?
Business User
What is the story?
We need a back end
The hypothesis
Flexible. reliable. Performance
Translate data and insights into a design prototype and an Executive Readout
- North star vision supported by use cases with performance measures
- Identified key challenges for prototype design
- Defined the key user and user pains.
- Captured business process and integrate into app
- Captured voice of users
- Provide recommend for improved user experience.

Results
Positive press about Customer Experience
Following quarterly earnings, Analyst reports about the vision of company customer experience were awesome. One market analyst story projected for the company to jump a spot among competitors in AKR.
Our MVP inspired leadership
As our MVP was wrapping up, excitement from reports floated up to company leadership. The CEO made a public announcement at CES 2023 (Consumer Electronics Show) that included mentions of rolling out“ an ecosystem of experiences that put customer needs and preferences at the center of the journey”.
Clear hypothesis for next phase in project
If we build a great user experience for business users to push customer experience opportunities, then we can improve CX for passengers which will result in improved Net Promoter Score.