ALASKA AIRLINES – DISRUPTIONS CENTER
/Product Design /UX Research /New Product
Disruption [dis-ruhp-shuhn] - a flight cancelation or +2 hour flight delay, most frequently on the day of/day before departure.
In 2019, Alaska Airlines conducted several research efforts around our guest communications during disruptions. Research showed that our travelers' satisfaction with pre-trip communications was 59% lower when a flight was delayed 4+ hours compared to an on-time flight. Moreover, communications that guests receive during disruptions are sent through both automated and manual tools, often leading to inconsistent messaging and experiences.
Feb - Aug 2020
Manage Reservation
Product Designer
Figma, Adobe XD, Abstract, UserTesting.com
To better understand the disruptions space, we started by looking at our current guest communications. We kept a few questions in mind: where do the pain points lie? Where are the mismatches between what we're communicating and what our guests are trying to achieve?
After looking into our existing guest experience, we then looked across the airline industry to see how our competitors were tackling the problem of disruptions.
We found that all of our major competitors already had a self-service tool that allowed guests to rebook themselves onto more convenient flight options. In addition, the best experiences featured clear, reassuring messaging. Delta's tool stood out in particular; as soon as a disruption occurred, the app would prompt guests to view alternative flights and guide them through the process step by step.
Despite our market research, nothing beats actual guest feedback. Our small discovery team (a UX researcher, two PMs, and I) listened to and tagged nearly a hundred call center conversations to hear pain points and guest needs straight from the source. Here are the most common themes:
Our top takeaways were that guests are immediately looking for alternative flight options during the 15+ minutes it takes Alaska to automatically rebook them, and even after being automatically rebooked, 55% of guests are not satisfied with their new itinerary. In addition, many guests have overall concerns about their new seats and the possibility of further delays.
To add to the above themes, we heard many of the same general sentiments over and over:
At this point, we brought our findings back to the full product team: me, my product manager, and my five engineers. Building off all of this information, we moved forward into the problem space with several "how-might-we" statements:
After brainstorming and employing the $100 test, our team agreed that the desired solution needed to be:
My wireframing process began on my whiteboard and eventually moved into Figma. My early iterations were focused heavily around what ended up being the two main components of our solution:
For our initial test, we ran a moderated study through UserTesting.com. We looked for ten testers that fly at least 2-3 times a year and have recently experienced a flight cancelation. Here are a just few of our many key learnings:
It was still early, but the first impressions were very promising. We asked our guests to rate the experience in terms of how clear it was to them, their level of confidence when going through it, and their satisfaction overall.
From this point, I made the following improvements:
After several rounds of unmoderated testing and polishing UI, we were ready for our biggest test yet. At Alaska, we are always sure to test with our elites– our frequent flyers, guests with mileage plan status with Alaska Airlines. For this prototype, we tested the app entrypoint (as opposed to SMS in the previous prototype.) The app notification would be able to reach our guests ~8 minutes faster than our usual email.
We interviewed six elites who flew a variety of business and leisure travel. Since they were such frequent travelers, all had at least one painful disruptions experience. Together, they voiced the following feedback:
Overall, our elite testers gave incredibly positive feedback on the concept, the prototype, and they were very excited to see this concept start to become a reality.
As usual, I tackled this project with a mobile-first approach. As we moved closer to launching our MVP, I translated the designs to desktop. Huge shoutout to my UI designer and UX writer for collaborating with me and working their magic throughout the process (proper credits at the bottom.)
To recap, I'll lay the original guest experience side by side with the new experience.
Previous experience:
New experience:
The Disruptions Center landing page launched in July 2020, with the self-service rebooking experience following in August for limited use cases (single passenger, nonstop flights, etc.) Multi-passenger, multi-segment itineraries followed in late 2020/early 2021. I moved onto a new product team around this time, in January 2021.
There are many features that we conceived and user tested that were never able to see the light of day due to timeline and development constraints. You might have noticed some of these in the early prototyping I showed above.
Overall, I feel that we had a very strong, sound approach to this problem and produced a game-changing tool for our guests. If I were to do one thing differently from this project, it would be to monitor our KPIs post-launch more closely and adapt our fast follows accordingly. I worked heads-down on the followup features up until I moved onto a new product, and I regret not following up with my product manager more on post-launch analytics. I think I can often fall into the tech cycle of "research -> iterate -> pump out MVP -> move onto the next project" without a ton of looking back on the product and how to improve it after the fact. This is a part of my game that I hope to develop more in the future.