Implementation

Reimagining Inflight Journeys with Personalised Mobile Experience

Business Challenge

The airline was looking to improve the overall mobile app experience, drive customer loyalty and increase cross-sell opportunity, hence set up two parallel workstreams working on the app re-design of key journeys and the introduction of a series of new inflight features to personalise inflight experience via thoughtful enablement of technology on mobile app.

On-site duration: 9+ months

My Role

I was the UX/UI Designer on the new inflight features workstream, aiming to deliver 3 quick-win features. Rather than diving right into implementation, I noticed potential CX risks and experience gaps, hence proactively proposed a more effective and efficient design approach that strategically aligns the holistic view across workstreams, 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 the new features workstream was set up, 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 overlapping entry points and journey moments between the 2 workstreams, rather than directly jumping into the business ask to start designing the standalone feature, I saw the need to take the app re-design into consideration and put together the bigger picture of how the 3 new features fit in the to-be mobile experience.

Therefore, I surfaced the potential CX risk to PO and counter-proposed to insert a discovery sprint before any implementation that could better set the team up for success, then I took some time to get a deeper understanding of the as-is mobile app problems and connected with the app re-design workstream to understand their direction and approach.

Framing the problem and crafting a holistic UX concept to envision a seamless flight experience

On the app re-design workstream backlog, they prioritised to re-design the homescreen to set the tone for the app re-design. As for us, we were looking to utilise homescreen to enable an inflight mode to serve the inflight entertainment. Hence, it might incur a CX risk and experience gap in the journey if the 2 workstreams designed separately in different directions.

To help the 2 teams share an aligned view of the to-be experience, I initiated to create a problem statement so that we had a shared goal that guides us through the design.

How might we utilise the mobile app to intuitively guide travellers throughout their flight journey, so that they can enjoy a frictionless and seamless experience?

After ideating around the leveraging a dynamic homescreen to enable a seamless experience, I started mapping the flight journey from pre-flight, inflight to post-flight incorporating the high-level idea of the inflight features to visualise the UX concept. I took it to get buy-in and align with cross-workstream POs and designers, and iterated it along the way with feedback.

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 workstream 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.

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 and unhappy paths, designing UI mockup, 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.