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.

Collaborators

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
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Design Thinking workshops

I designed and facilitated interactive collaborative experiences for multi-discipline participants.

  • define current state of their customer experience engine. 
  • storyboard and sketch use cases.
  • clarify the vision, use cases and KPIs
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Stakeholder Interviews

I conducted 11 interviews with the client’s subject matter experts from various parts of the company.

  • collect experience data 
  • identify questions and insights for future exploration
  • gather feedback on recommendations
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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
Challenge

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..."

Opportunity

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."

Vision

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.

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 meetings

Workshop recap & next steps
Review activity outputs
Prototyping activity outputs
Storyboarding activity outputs
Priority ranking
Previous
Next

The 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?​

Front line, back office or Product owner

Business User

Our assumption was that our front line worker was the MVP user but after discovery we learned that our back office user was to changing the passenger experience.

What is the story?​

How to impact passenger experience?

We need a back end

The data architecture was not suitable, data was delayed and the technical platform was not suitable. The backend of the engine is where we can have the most impact on passenger experience.

The hypothesis

What does success loook like?

Flexible. reliable. Performance

If we can make a reliable back office experience that a business user can use with less IT support then the team can better respond to customer & passenger scenarios.

Translate data and insights into a design prototype and an Executive Readout

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.