Ethos Air
Building a transparent and flexible experience for frequent flyers
ROLE: Researcher, UX / UI Design
Duration: 80 Hours
Web design for airline travel has an alluring array of unique design patterns and microinteractions to explore. Ethos Air is a concept project of a new airline whose goal is to launch a minimum viable product that offers a streamlined experience for their core digital user flow.
My approach: identify the target audience for Ethos Air, discover their pain points and define their goals. From research I found that trust and transparency were the ultimate deal breakers for our users. Through ideation and usability testing I developed a responsive flow allowing users to quickly and easily cancel or update a booked flight.
The Problem
How might we give frequent flyers the flexibility to change their plans while still feeling like they’re getting the best value for their money?
The Solution
Build a transparent experience that offers flexibility to frequent flyers as well as ease in error recovery.
Discover
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
Define
Affinity Map
Persona
POV & HMW
Develop
Sitemap
Task Flows
Wireframing
UI Kit
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Deliver
Iterations
Competitive Analysis
I conducted competitive analysis with four major American airlines to understand which features and functionalities rival airlines offer across both desktop and mobile breakpoints.
I was surprised to learn that very few airlines offer a web mobile experience that matches their desktop version in clarity and usability.
The clutter of popups, cookie preferences and links to the app often get in the way for a user who doesn’t want to commit to downloading the official app.
I also learned that error recovery and search results sorting were lackluster at best in the web mobile experience.
This exercise helped me prioritize certain features such as searching for flights and updating booked flights to gain an edge in the marketplace.
User Interviews
I conducted 5 interviews with a diverse group of travelers to learn what they expect when they search for and book a flight. I also asked them to name an enjoyable experience or functionality that exists outside airline travel. My intent was to find novel ways to improve the conventional experience of airline travel.
A common issue emerged from my participants: Canceling or updating flights, as well as difficulty recovering from errors they have made. The majority of participants also wanted to feel that they were gaining the best value from the choices they made in the flight booking process.
Our Users
Who are they?
Families as well as individuals aged 27 to 44
Flying is a necessary evil that they must endure
Cancellation policy and error forgiveness are a must
Why should we care?
Savvy, skeptical and hungry for reliability
Opportunity to build trust and loyalty
Eager to switch to a flexible service that simplifies most interactions
Affinity Mapping & User Personas
I distilled the findings of my affinity map into two personas to keep me focused on the needs of my users. Whether they are arranging travel plans for family or seizing the best deal from their flight search, our users want reliability and transparency. They want to know that if they make a mistake, they can easily fix it without being heavily penalized for it.
The Problem
This led to the formulation of my “How Might We” question:
“How might we give frequent flyers the flexibilty to change their plans while still feeling like they’re getting the best value for their money?”
In order to collect ideas from different perspectives I returned to the notion of successful experiences that occur outside of the airline industry.
Many of my participants mentioned the ease of rescheduling a doctor appointment online-it was an option that was always readily available to them right next to their booked appointment.
This nudged me toward focusing on a flow that empasized a transparent and simple way to change/cancel a flight.
Sitemap
Before launching into my task flows I wanted to ascertain what my users would expect from a airline booking experience. I studied the sitemaps of my competitors to learn the terminology. I built my sitemap with the intention of setting a larger context around the area of the experience I would be focusing on: updating a booked flight.
Task Flows
All of my users mentioned how the task of changing the time of a booked flight was quite difficult for them.
I studied the process from my competitors, taking screenshots of the process while cherry-picking the parts that worked. From this I developed a task flow that streamlined the complicated number of steps that went into the process of updating the time of a pre-booked flight.
Having it laid out in such a fashion provided a focus toward specific screens I would develop for my prototype.
Wireframing
All of my participants preferred performing the task of changing a flight time on their desktop browsers. I started there, basing my sketches off of the screens that contained delightful design patterns I had cherry-picked for my task flow research.
Based on the feedback I received, I was able to remove all of the unnecessary elements I had added to the platform in my low and mid-fidelity wireframes.
I arrived at a flow that remained faithful to the needs of my users while still offering an experience that matched or exceeded their expectations of existing airlines in the marketplace.
UI Kit & Branding
I reviewed my user interviews and affinity map to create a set of brand values for Ethos Air. From this I was able to create a moodboard and skectch logo designs. I settled on a compass to represent Ethos Air’s commitment to their brand values: Transparency, sustainability and innovation. I applied the colors to a style tile I created of the Ethos Air homepage.
Usability Testing
To test the functionality of the new features I conducted 5 moderated usability tests with participants who are frequent travelers. I created a scenario where a user needed to push the departure time of a booked flight to later in the afternoon. In order to narrow their search, they required a direct flight with the same class of seat, arriving at their destination before a certain time. I hypothesized that 3 minutes would be the average time to complete this task. I also wanted to see if our users would find any alternate paths while completing the goal.
I monitored their interaction with the feature and recorded their feedback.
User feedback was quite positive and they were able to find and complete the flow well under three minutes. I captured all of the feedback and behavior and sorted it on a venn diagram of what was successful and what required more attention. Since all of the elements were in their expected location, I focused on the screens where all of my users hesitated or slowed down.
Iterations
I placed all of the feedback on a prioritization matrix. Based on the results of the usability tests, I made the following iterations to the design:
Price buttons for seat classes: 3 out of 5 users didn’t think the price options of each seat class were clickable. I moved the headings for each class above the grid and created buttons that highlighted the price of each seat.
Brighter neutral background color: Most of the users hesitated on screens that had lots of information. I brightened the background neutral color to make the text and elements easier to read.
Clearer labels: All of the users hesitated as they tried to differentiate their departing flight from their return flight. I added labels to clarify those elements and I renamed some of the steps within the progress tracker to more clearly match the action that the user was taking on the screen.
Next Steps
More user testing would be in order to evaluate the effectiveness of my UI changes. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance user satisfaction and decrease the amount of time spent hesitating in certain areas of the flow.
Many of my participants expressed surprise at how easy it was to accomplish this multi-step task. My findings have indicated that I am on the right path toward helping users feel like they have more flexibility and control with the flight booking process.