Re-imagining the flight change experience

Re-imagining the Alaska Airlines Flight Change Experience

The Details 

I led the user research and content strategy for a re-imagined flight change experience for Alaska Airlines, a major American airline based out of SeaTac, Washington. This project was part of my capstone project for the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Gathered quantitative and qualitative data through surveys, customer interviews, and usability testing to understand common pain points with the Alaska Airlines flight change experience

• Developed design guidelines that guided the development of a prototype of a new flight change experience

Reducing call center volume and empowering guests

Call center volume at Alaska Airlines has increased faster than Alaska Airlines business size. Our team saw this as an opportunity to empower Alaska Airlines guests to feel confident in the flight change experience.

I was the research lead and content strategist on our team. During interviews and usability tests, my primary strengths were in establishing rapport with research participants, translating research insights into design recommendations, and telling a story about how we developed our high-fidelity mock-up with end users in mind.

Understanding how preferences change with context

To understand what tools Alaska Airlines guests use when changing their flight and how these preference change with context, we designed a survey on Typeform. A survey enabled us to learn the preferences from the largest user base possible, and we asked for demographic data about age, travel purpose (business or leisure), and mileage plan to see if there were significant differences across these populations.

One interesting finding was that guests under the age of 35 have a higher preference for the mobile app and computer, whereas guests over the age of 25 prefer the Call Center over self-service tools.

Usability test findings

From our survey, we identified 8 interview respondents and conducted 45-minute interviews with them, which comprised of a few open-ended questions and a usability test of the current system. Because of my past experience as a journalist, I wrote a set of interview questions that would enable us to understand how interviewees travel, learn about their past experience with changing flights, and give them the opportunity to ask questions.

During each interview, we also conducted a usability test of the current flight change system, and we had the following findings:

Guests want more feedback: Guests want more feedback throughout the process to ensure that they’re successfully changing their flight.

Redundancy is distracting: Guests were confused by the repetition of the original reservation. However, it was helpful to have some reference to their original reservation.

The current system lacks intuitive language: Many guests were confused by the meaning of terms like “credit” and “My wallet,” and often needed to Google these terms or call to learn more

Change fees were an important factor when changing their flight: When looking at new reservations, guests inquired about if they would be charged a change fee. However, the current system made it unclear whether they would be charged or not.

“[There is] a separate $125 per person change fee … I don't know whether I will be actually charged that fee.”

-Interview Participant (P4)

Key Findings

Based on our research findings, we developed a design hypothesis that informed our high fidelity prototype:

Improving terminology, information architecture, and feedback will increase guest confidence and trust in the change experience.

Our team used Usertesting.com to test our high-fidelity prototype with 8 participants. For our user group, we decided to focus on Alaska Airlines users who may or may not have a mileage plan, but are responsible for paying a change fee. This demographic represented the largest part of our data.

Overall, participants thought our system was simple & easy to navigate. Participants described our prototype as “straightforward”(P7) ,“clear” (P5),  and “self-explanatory”(P8). All 8 participants ranked the task as a 1 (very easy to complete) on a scale of 1 to 5

Design guidelines

Based on our findings from surveys, interviews, and our usability test, I wrote the following design guidelines that guided the development of our high fidelity prototype I wrote design guidelines that could inform future iterations of the change process and guide the work of designers. Moreover, design principles are more durable than a mock-up alone because it can be a reference to the desires and needs of Alaska Airlines guests.

Break it down: The process of changing a flight should be broken down into manageable parts.

To demonstrate this value, we:

• Separated the passenger and flight selection process into multiple pages. Each page had a discrete action, reducing information overload for the user.

• Added breadcrumbs so guests can track their progress and know where they are in the change process. This was a feature that was used by other airlines like United, JetBlue, and American Airlines, which we discovered through our competitive analysis.

Be transparent: Guests should know how their old reservation relates to their new reservation. Change fees should be communicated up front. To demonstrate this value:

We created a clear cost breakdown that shows the cost differences between the  old and new reservation and change fees. We also provided an hover feature we users could see how their previous reservation applied to their new reservation, and we used language that was consistent with Alaska Airlines’ policies for changing a flight reservation.

Provide context: Not everyone knows the term “credit” or how they’ll receive a refund. We should provide this information in context. To address this:

• The original reservation is available for reference at the top of the page when selecting a new flight.

• We implemented hover features that enable guests can see information about terms like “credit” and “My wallet” in context. I also focused on using language that was consistent with Alaska Airline’s policies.

Lessons learned and next steps

From this project, I learned that:

In a flight change experience, guests value cost transparency, guidance, and intuitive language: These values were reiterated in the call center visit, interviews, and our usability tests. Although our prototype will continue to be developed, our team believes that these values should be kept in mind when applied to future iterations of the flight change experience.

Taking a user-centered approach starts with listening: As a journalist, I focus on listening without assumptions or judgments, and I verbally reiterate key themes so they know that I’m listening. I applied this same principle as a researcher, and I found that it created a sense of trust with interview and usability test participants.

It’s essential to advocate for your design decisions with evidence: During our final presentation to Alaska Airlines leadership, we paired every design recommendation with a quote from a user. This ensured that people in the room had an idea of what users were saying about the current system. We also included quotes from usertesting.com to highlight strengths in our proposed design.

Opportunities for growth

If I could do anything differently, I would have created a consistent analysis approach for our survey and interview findings. My team members and I each coded our interviews differently, so I had to spend a lot of extra time going through the interview transcripts to find quotes that justified my findings. Next time, I will focus on identifying a cohesive coding scheme so I can easily understand the data.

In the future, I will also take advantage of opportunities for feedback. For example, I could have spent more time talking to my professor about opportunities for improvement in our design. In my future work, I also hope to schedule feedback meetings with team members and supervisors to ensure that feedback is a continuous part of my design process.

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