And now for the disclaimer. All confidential information has been removed in cooperation with the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Any stats may have been altered to not disclose any data. This case study is a reflection of my own views and not necessarily the views of ViaSat and its airline partners.
To make people fall in love with travel again; particularly air travel, was going to take more then just saying "We offer the best WiFi ever". The first thing that I wanted to tackle was the stress of the passenger as well as the airline employee. It took a few iterations for us to make the connection that the passenger and employee experience go hand and hand.
Then came the questions. I had a lot of questions. Why does air travel have to be so rudimentary and stressful? How can we help our airline employees and passengers with an end-to-end inflight and care advocacy process? What's it like to be an airline employee?
70% of passengers say that they would change airlines if they were offered free Wi-Fi.
Passenger: B2C, e-commerce, AI, and VR IFE. Airline: B2B, support and workflow (admin).
iOS, Android, and mobile and desktop browsers.
As a Lead UI/UX Design team member, my daily interactions were in research, focus group testing, IA, visual concepts, interactions, and UI development for our R&D and Mobility experiences. Being a part of the R&D team gave me the chance to work on additional improvements for our airline passengers and employees and experiment in an encouraging environment.
Captured resourceful information about the travel and mobility industry and our customers (internal and external). Gathered and reviewed user stories, business and technical requirements, and data/BI points to determine the crucial needs of the user and business adjectives. Partcipated in user testing for new features and apps to make sure KPIs and user needs were met.
It was important to see what was happening in the industry and how we could bring something different to the airline world. I studied and researched competitive and industry mobility leaders and disruptors in the travel space. We had the opportunity to offer more than just Wi-Fi and technical support for that service. The path was to find how to match options to partner our airline customers with their passengers.
The Data/BI Science team gathered insights from our customers regarding Wi-Fi service and support. After reviewing that information along with the competitive and industry discovery resources, I proceeded with constructing the picture of the user and their daily life as a passenger or an airline employee.
Airlines know that they are losing revenue passengers due to poor Wi-Fi service and customer service interactions.
Outlined our user personas and their motivations, end-to-end journeys as well as their frustrations. Worked on passenger and support care scenarios after data assessment to better gauge customer inflight interactions and experiences.
So we know that we have this great feature that everyone craves when traveling but how will it help all of our customers. Many questions arised like "Who would need a support platform?", "How high is the frustration level?", and " What's the adoption rate for VR and is there really a need for it?". It was time to take a look at what it really is to be a passenger and an airline employee.
17%
Families: Of all passengers who need to be entertained online.
2 out of 5
Adventure passengers: Who need access to information, especially on long-haul flights and in remote locations.
25%
Business fliers: Of all passengers who need to be productive online. They would benefit from a monthly subscription option.
It was important to understand how passengers see travel, the usage of Wi-Fi and how to take away the stress and frustration from discovery to post-travel. We needed to empower passengers through the experience and provide real-time information through all touch points.
We wanted travel translated from frustrating into simple, quick, and comfortable.
Rethinking the operation flow at airlines and airports to promote better collaboration and communication, lower costs, less paper filing and reliability, and fleet efficiency. Our platform would need to equip them with the right metrics and tools to work together and to aid passengers.
After discovery and mapping, I quickly built lo‐fi wireframes in Lucidchart and mid/high‐fi prototypes in Adobe Photoshop with InVision and/or Adobe XD. Also, I delivered annotations and guides with the assets for the user flows and system messages. I would later adopt Sketch, Craft, InVision and Zeplin in my workflow. During each sprint, I encouraged constant feedback sessions with the product team.
Our team conducted the Google Ventures 5‐day Sprint for various mobile and web apps to quickly find a solution or experiment with a feature.
Our service had to challenge the usual visual, functional, and conversational patterns.
With each sprint, we continued to collect insights and strive for making the solutions easier and comfortable to engage with on a daily basis.
Keeping security in mind became a theme along with comfort and convenience with each iteration.
In the following iterations, internationalization and payment options brought on new questions and challenges that made our team have to re-examine our workflows and layout orientation (LTR and RTL). Meanwhile, I started to explore AI and AR/VR for training, e-commerce (IFE and IFC), and support purposes. I wanted the chatbot to feel like a person speaking with you and worked on the challenge on how to make it feel like a companion that was guiding you through an order or support ticket process.
Developed the working prototype in HTML5/CSS3/JS and handed it off to a Salesforce developer for completion. I worked with the development team to make sure the tools, API and plugins that we use are best for optimal performance. My main development stack was node.js and express.js with Heroku for app deployment, Bootstrap, D3 for data visualizations, and GitHub for version control.
Being a part of the mobility initative allowed me to explore the pain points and present valuable solutions. We developed a seamless passenger Wi-Fi purchase and travel experience while mirroring a simple support airline personnel workflow. There were a lot of lessons to be learnt during the process. When we first started out we were thinking of the airline support, passenger IFE/IFE and passenger care as isolated platforms and solutions but over the iterations we realized that they are linked and they are part of the larger ecosystem. I believe that once we involved our partners and users more it helped us redefine our products and gave them a better experience. Below are some of the highlights of that journey:
The new systems are helping enable our airline employees to better communicate with their team and has increased productivity. In return, we received encouraging feedback regarding passengers using our Wi-Fi and IFE/IFC option. Passenger satisifaction increased knowing that the airline employee (in the air or on the ground) can assist them immediately with their internet service and purchase concerns or questions. Hopefully, we have made steps of helping people fall in love with travel (again).