Delta | Virgin Atlantic Product Design
I was brought on to the Delta/Virgin Atlantic team at AKQA to help with redesigning the ‘Customer Experience’ part of their platform, including the flight itinerary, profile and loyalty sections of the product. After ‘Shopping and Booking’, this was the most crucial component of the product. The project was challenging on several fronts:
I was tasked with quickly adapting to not one, but two visual identities, whilst ideating on product concepts.
The team had undergone a full user-experience research process, so I had to quickly onboard and synthesise personas and pain-points in order to stay on track during the design process
The team was split across London and Atlanta, so my communication skills were honed to a fine point.
We debated and ultimately decided as a team to switch from Sketch to Figma during the ideation phase, the latter being an app that I had never used before and had to learn on the fly (I think Figma is better than Sketch for collaborating across different locations)
The project is ongoing, as I (somewhat ironically) left the team to pursue travel. However I’m really proud of the work that I did there, and hope to see some of my concepts brought into final launch.
Agency: AKQA
UK UX Director: Drew Huddleston
UK UX: Fanny Monier, Sia Georgieva
US ACD: Sarah Lockwood
US Art Director: George Lukin, Taylor Daniel
I worked as a Senior Designer, and my main contribution was ideating solutions along two tracks: Flight Itinerary Builder and New User Enrolment.
“For people like me who are planners, all trip needs are accessible in one location vs. having to check multiple websites. This is the routine I go through for every trip I book. I typically book all aspects early on and then relax and count the days until take off.”
Source: General member (Delta post purchase ideation research 2018)
We decided to engage with this learning by creating a ‘itinerary builder’ — a feature that would support the user’s trip beyond their flight with Delta to include hotel bookings, departure and arrival airport information, and a host of other functionalities that served to collate essential travel information into one place. We felt a timeline was the best expression of this builder, as it allowed the user to focus on the most pertinent task at hand according to what was coming up on their itinerary. This feature also provided Delta with opportunities for ancillary purchases such as partnered car-rentals.
We created many ‘cards’ that could flex to serve different functionalities along the itinerary. These flexed across multiple devices, and information could be prioritized according to device-specific core tasks.
During discovery, we found that around 21% of travellers want a pre-flight checklist, particularly in relation to required documents like visas and passport information. We collaborated on a few different iterations of what that checklist might look like — this was one of the options present to the leadership team for review.
One of the main design challenges was to maintain a consistent system across two visually distinct brands: Virgin Atlantic and Delta. Luckily, both brands already had robust design patterns that could be used to quickly iterate solutions.
