Redefining the airline experience

Team
25 designers, 3 cities

Duration
24 months

My role
UX designer: discovery, research, conceptualization, wireframing, prototyping and usability testing.

Platform
Website

The flagship airline carrier of Saudi Arabia has expanded its route network over the years to cover numerous domestic and international destinations, making it a key player in the global aviation industry. KSA aims to become an international hub for logistics, tourism and an investment powerhouse. With strong roots in its national transformation agenda, the airline aims to “serve as the Wings of Vision 2030 and welcome the world to Saudia Arabia.”

As part of a 5-year digital transformation, we embarked on this project with the focus on enhancing the existing experience, shaping the future with service thinking and bringing innovation as a constant to the airline’s expansive channels.

Overview

With the demand and operational activity of the airline industry catching up to pre-pandemic levels, we embarked on a transformative journey with focus on the present, shaping the future with service thinking and bringing innovation as a constant across all channels.

To do that, we challenged conventional thinking, put the customer at the heart and embraced an experimental mindset. Our path to delivering value started with evaluating past work, deep research on the customer sentiment, assessing and providing recommendations on the current core channels, conceptualizing a new visual direction as well as rapid prototyping, designing and testing the MLP for the web and app channels – laying the groundwork for a scalable design methodology and enhanced future experience.

Our approach

The current experience saw a lot of scope for improvement. From overwhelming options and an abundance of incomprehensible features to inconsistent use of UI components and brand assets, both the app and web had plenty of areas for us to tackle.


In our comprehensive benchmark analysis, we evaluated the features of 56 airline websites and 62 airline apps, focusing on functionality, user interface, speed, and overall user experience. Key considerations in the new design were easy discoverability and simplicity, ensuring that users can easily navigate the website anf app while still being able to complete the most crucial tasks.
We conducted multiple discovery workshops with stakeholders to align around impact areas, highlighting trends and best practices globally across industries, and playing back critical customer pain-points identified during user interviews.

Studying the present

the beginning

During my role as an interaction designer in this project, my main contributions (among others) were in designing 2 end-to-end experiences — Manage My Booking and Government Travel.

My contributions in the project

Manage My Booking

How might we…

This is one of the most used features across all digital channels and the reason for most calls to the Guest Call Centre. While designing the experience, we aimed to resolve some crucial questions:

  • How might we help our customers view their trip summary quickly?

  • How might we help passengers avail ancillary services like seat selection, extra baggage, Wi-Fi on board and meal selection?

  • How might we allow customers to easily change or cancel trips?

Research

After the initial audit of the current experience, we identified several areas of improvements that required user experience intervention. In our comprehensive benchmark analysis, we also evaluated journeys of 62 airlines and incorporated the insights derived from this exercise while creating low fidelity wireframes for Manage My Booking.

Low-fidelity flows

Wireframes

After various iterations for the trip landing page, I narrowed down on the option that resolved all customer pain points while also enhancing the overall experience.

landing page iterations

  • Clear option to manage booking on homepage

  • Scannable and easy to understand layout of trips page

  • Familiar journeys as the booking flow reducing the learning curve for users

  • Cancel and refund flow in just 2 clicks

Improvements

Government Travel

Brief

An all-new experience for the digital channel, Government Travel focuses on the process of booking tickets for government employees and their family members. With exclusive discounts on air fares, free seat selection and the introduction of e-wallet to customers, this feature aimed to reduce all the load currently handled by the Guest Call Centre and divert them to the online channel.

Understanding the journey

Government Travel was a completely offline process for years. To create digital experience meant for us to understand an agent and a customer’s respective journeys, expectations, and challenges. We did this through workshops and interviews where government agents explained existing processes, the challenges they encounter, reasons prompting customer interactions with customer care, and what their ideal booking process for government tickets would look like.

Additionally, customers provided valuable insights into their primary concerns regarding agent interactions and the dated process of booking flights.

Customer pain points

45+ minutes waiting time

A major obstacle for customers is getting in touch with the agent causing frustration with the lengthy wait times, the lack of transparency on the wait time and being timed out. It's too late to satisfy the customer by the time the agent is connected.

Lack of alternative identity verification methods

Customers are verified via their mobile number or security code, causing problems for users who are unable to access their device to call or retrieve the security code. Having more identification options like using ids that cannot be duplicated such as national ID can solve this problem.

Simplify document validation

Currently agents manually verify customers' identification documents in person or via WhatsApp. This results in longer wait times and a more time-consuming process for both the agent and the customer.

Need for automation

Long customer wait times, agent error, and inconsistent prices can all result from manual calculations. To avoid these issues, the process should be automated. This will increase customer loyalty while also saving time.

Payment concerns

The process of providing credit card information is done over the phone, which causes customer concern and a longer process.

Lack of voucher awareness

Customers become confused about which vouchers are valid and which have expired leading to wasted vouchers and customer complaints. Timely reminders should be sent to use the vouchers before they expire.

Wireframes

After several discovery and requirement gathering sessions with the business and product teams, I created the user flows for various features and functionalities, keeping in mind the customer insights from workshops.

  • A dedicated landing page about the benefits of the service, how it works and a quick way to login/register

  • Profile dashboard with the user details and wallet balance, one-stop shop to carry out all possible actions related to government travel

  • Booking time cut down from 45 mins to 7 mins

  • Allow users to manage their gov trips digitally in just 4-7 mins

  • Mixed payment method allowing users to pay for flights with debit/credit card when their wallet balance is running low

  • Instant transfer of funds back to wallet upon trip cancellation with the balance displayed accurately

Improvements

Since the new web and app experiences went live, there have been significant improvements in customer adoption rates and customer satisfaction.

  • 3Mn+ bookings since go-live of our digital platform

  • 40% less steps during registration

  • 144+ new services launched

  • 9% reduction in booking time

  • Multi-city flight booking time reduced from 12 mins to 3 mins

  • Check-in process reduced form 9 to 2 steps

  • 13% increase in customer engagement

  • 38% more visits to web and app

  • App Store and Google Play ratings improved from 2.5-3 to 4.7

Overall project impact