Alaska Airlines//
DIGITAL EXPERIENCES
It all starts with creating an airline people love by optimizing and creating engaging digital touchpoints. Spanning multiple product teams, my team of designers supports the not-so-linear part of our guest journey – that means everything except the shopping/booking and getting on the plane. We’re responsible for our homepage, the entire account experience that includes Alaska Airlines’ award-winning loyalty program, all content pages (including our route map & help center page), global elements (i.e. header and footer), authentication, and even the app our concierge agents use in our lounges to check in our guests.
challenges were faced along the way
The guest-facing experiences relied on many very outdated systems – in technology years some would be considered ancient
An ever-changing org – during my tenure we faced two physical address changes, multiple re-orgs, and many leadership departures that also resulted in big process changes
Teams were often asked to pivot for large company-wide initiatives that strayed from their current work and always had an impact on the momentum
Help an airline stay alive when the entire industry was grounded due to COVID and air travel was non-existent
solution & outcome
The trick was to keep the team focused on solving user problems. Listen to the business needs and find out where they align with user challenges. Create a hypothesis with the team that addresses the identified alignment (product, design, and engineering), ideate on possible solutions, test, learn and iterate. By using tools like Quantum Metric, Qualtrix, and usertesting.com to test and learn, the designers were able to help measure the success of their effort and share those results back to the business.
Even amidst all the challenges, my team accomplished an astonishing amount of work that's paving the way for the continued modernization of alaskaair.com and priming the company for growth on the other side of the pandemic.
