Team: May Phan, Tiffany (Yen-shi) Chen, Riley Nicholson, Z (Zhiyu) Ren *Snowflake is not a real airline company. This branding has been created to keep our project sponsor confidential.
For an interaction design course, my group and I explored features in an airline travel app to help streamline irregular operations, such as delays and cancellations. This project consisted of initial user research with customers and CSAs at a Chicago airport, prototyping and design, usability testing, and iteration. Our project sponsor has been replaced by "Snowflake" for confidentiality, but is a major U.S. airline.
Value proposition: Our solution for Snowflake Airlines introduces ticket linking for groups, promoting flyer autonomy and reducing CSA workload. By making it easier for groups to rebook themselves, providing multi-channel notifications, and adding in delightful touches, our solution aims to improve both passenger and agent experiences, making dealing with irregular operations (IROPs) a smoother and more efficient process.
Problem + Outcomes
Delays and cancellations are always stressful for flyers and customer service agents. How do we help make rebookings as simple as possible?
Problem: Flight delays and cancellations are often a source of chaos for airports, airlines, and customers. When customers' plans are disrupted, the rush to have flights rebooked is often disorganized and filled with emotions. Customer service agents are often overwhelmed. Our client plans to cut down on customer service agents at gates, making prompt self-service through the Snowflake app essential.
Outcomes: Conducted over 12 interviews with CSAs and airline customers to determine whitespace opportunity areas, prototyped 120+ screens, designed an innovative app feature for linking tickets alongside 2 supporting concepts to help with notifications and rebooking. Conducted 2 rounds of usability testing with 8+ participants and iterated 3 rounds to create a thoughtful final concept that prioritized user and business needs. Presented to client sponsors for the final presentation.
Initial UX Research
Finding specific pain points for customer service agents and customers when airline delays happen.
Secondary Research: We began our research by conducting broad research, guided by an extensive research packet of customer experiences provided by our client sponsors.
Primary Research: Our class traveled to Midway Airport in Chicago for an afternoon to interview traveling customers and service agents. Among those I interviewed included families, a kind customer service agent that went above and beyond to provide a hotel stay to customers, and a woman traveling with a rare-breed service dog. Common themes that emerged included an airline culture of customer service that goes above and beyond, common travel needs that required customers to talk to CSAs before each flight, and special considerations when traveling with families and groups.
Notable Research Insights
Initial Brainstorm, Insights, and Midterm: After synthesizing our insights, we brainstormed 4 sets of ideas, each one surrounding an insight, and brought these to the midterm to present to the Snowflake innovation team. We received positive feedback on the ticket-linking idea in our customer convenience theme, as well as on our experimental notifications idea.
A group photo after our midterm presentation!
Process Work
Brainstorming ways to streamline group travel, make rebooking as easy as possible, and notify customers through multiple channels.
Based on feedback we received from the midterm, we refined a how might we statement to align our design ideas with our initial prompt: to help streamline irregular operations such as flight delays and cancellations by reducing customer service agents' workloads at the gate.
How might we make it easier for families and people traveling in groups to have a better, more convenient gate experience?
From an informal competitive analysis, we found that while linking tickets after purchasing separately is a novel feature, there are great rebooking flows on other trusted airline apps such as United and American Airlines. We decided to pursue our linking concept as our focus, while bringing rebooking capabilities of Snowflake's app up to speed. Another consideration throughout our design process was incorporating delight to increase brand loyalty.
Personas to better frame our project.
To help narrow down our many ideas, we created a few different user journey flows within the app to map out where our ideas would fit on our personas' journey - a girls' trip to Denver.
An information flow for our linking feature on a flight with no delays.
Design
Translating ticket linking, smoother rebookings, and dynamic notifications into pixels, to test and iterate.
Our round 1 prototypes. We jumped right into high-fidelity by working within a provided design system.
Although we felt fairly confident in our initial prototypes, 2 rounds of usability testing with a total of 8 friends and family members who often traveled revealed gaps in our concepts.
Lack of Onboarding For a feature as unfamiliar to users as linking, many interviewees had questions about what it was for and how to use it. To better introduce linking, we added a short tutorial.
Wait - how do I choose my seats? Although picking your seat is essential to buying tickets and rebooking, it flew over our radar. We added these flows in to make the experience more cohesive.
Chatbots? No thanks An initial concept we had for rebooking was a chatbot, alongside our self-select options. Interviewees noted that self-selection was quicker and disliked chatbots in general. We replaced the chatbot with the ability to talk to a CSA online.
The app looks kind of stale Overall, our interviewees felt the app worked. However, it felt a bit too clean and not exciting/energetic like a travel app. We added in additional screens with illustrations to help people still get the "Snowflake" experience with less CSA interactions.
We took this feedback and implemented edits that were essential to our final deliverable, ensuring functionality, a guided user experience, and customer delight, better aligning with our design goals. Below are the main flows after iteration.
Onboarding to introduce linking to users.
Learnings + Next Steps
Presenting around a specific user's journey to introduce concepts with empathy, while highlighting business value.
I was proud of how much my group was able to iterate and usability test in only 10 weeks. Presenting our final by focusing on a clear user journey and story, our personas' Girls' Trip to Denver, made it easier to present in a way that wasn't overwhelming. This was helped by omitting explorations that weren't as relevant or impactful to our final story.
Additionally, we framed our final design proposal to our awesome client sponsors through communicating user value (such as saving time for travelers, increasing delight, etc.) as well as value to the business (less work for customer service agents through easy group rebooking, meaning hours and salaries saved). In communicating business value, we did our best to use hard numbers to quantify potential impact, as well as comparing our design proposal to the company's business goals. This helped back up our proposal beyond the storytelling.
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