Reimagining Inflight Journeys with 'Always Connected' Experience

UX Strategy

UX Design

UI Design

Usability Research

Scrum

Business Challenge

The airline was looking to improve the overall mobile app experience, drive customer loyalty and increase cross-sell opportunity, hence looking to introduce a series of new inflight features to uplift and personalise inflight experience via thoughtful enablement of technology on mobile app.

On-site duration: 9+ months

My Role

I was the only UX/UI Designer on the scrum team. While PO was planning to dive right into shipping standalone feature, I noticed potential CX risks and experience gaps, hence proactively proposed to insert a design sprint to better define the UX strategy, followed by delivering user flows, wireframes and UI mockups for each of the features.

Business team:
1 x Product Owner, 2 x Proxy Product Owner, 2 Business Analyst

Delivery team:
1 x UX/UI Designer (My role), 3 x iOS Developer, 3 x Android Developer

Rather than diving right into implementation, let's take a step back and zoom out

As we kicked off, PO briefed us about the 3 new inflight quick-win features in the product backlog, with a plan to directly start the UX/UI design and development of the first feature.

As I noticed the potential CX risks, rather than directly jumping into the business ask to start designing the standalone feature, I saw the need to re-visit the core problems we were trying to solve and look at the bigger picture of the holistic experience.

Therefore, I surfaced the potential CX risk to PO and proposed to insert a design sprint before any implementation that could better set the team up for success.

Reframing the problem and crafting a holistic UX concept to envision a seamless always connected flight experience

As I went back to the researchers to get a better view of the research findings, the core problem was that - once customers got onto their flights, they were no longer connected to network, also leading to disconnected experience with the brand on app.
1 ) No longer be able to receive real-time information
2 ) Customer experience heavily rely on cabin crew's servicing
3 ) Even worse customer experience on screenless cabins, without any entertainment
4 ) Missed opportunity to enable personalisation and cross sell inflight ancillary services

How might we leverage the inflight connectivity to bridge the disconnected experience gap between pre-flight and post-flight, so that customers can stay connected with us during inflight and across the journey, to enjoy a seamless and more personalised customer experience?

Then, we ideated around leveraging a dynamic homescreen as the anchor to bridge the disconnected experience gap and enable a seamless journey. I then mapped out the flight journey from pre-flight, inflight to post-flight incorporating the high-level idea of the inflight features to visualise the UX concept.

UX concept of how a dynamic homescreen would enable a seamless customer experience of the flight journey from pre-flight, inflight to post-flight incorporating the high-level idea of the inflight features

Uplifting inflight experience via thoughtful enablement of technology and personalisation on mobile app

Once we reached a shared view of the dynamic homescreen design direction, based on that as foundation, our team began the feature design and development of the inflight features one by one - from bringing inflight entertainment to travellers on screenless cabins, visualising inflight service flow, to enabling personalisation of travellers' inflight journey.
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For each of the feature, I covered the end-to-end UX/UI design delivery, from journey mapping, wireframing, mapping the user flow for happy path, working on unhappy paths and different use cases (e.g. across different flight statuses including check-in open and transit), designing UI mockups, to testing and shipping the workable feature with developers.

Validating desirability and usability through guerrilla testing at the terminal

While we had not been able to arrange for a proper user research, I proactively advocated for the value of gaining quick feedback from customer, and initiated running guerrilla testings at the terminal, which is a simple and cost-effective way of design validation. Throughout the design cycle, we prototyped the feature and brought it to the terminal for guerrilla testings with travellers to validate our design assumptions and understand customer perceptive on the ideas, which enabled rapid iteration and improvement of the design before launching.

In the middle of the phase, our team experienced the change of PO, which might have impacted the team moral and caused slight disruption to the delivery plan. As my role was the one working more closely with PO, I was able to maintain the team delivery velocity and ensure a smooth transition period, and supported the new PO to get up to speed with the delivery plan. As a result, we managed to successfully deliver the quick-win features as planned. The new mobile app has achieved a big improvement on app store rating, from 2.6 to 4.2. And the new releases also enabled better upselling of Wi-Fi usage purchase.