Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines is the world’s largest low-cost carrier. Southwest Innovation partnered with Deloitte Digital to reimagine the travel experience. You can read more in the Wall Street Journal.
Design Lead | Deloitte Digital | 2019/2020
We designed a beta app exclusive to a few hundred users and are treating this as a sandbox for feature testing. While reviewing usage analytics to determine popular features, we’ve also conducted in-person testing at airports. The most successful features are iterated and added into the main Southwest app.
CONTEXTImproving your experience, the day of travel.
The scope of this engagement is hyper focused on the 48 hour customer experience when catching a flight. This includes tasks like calculating the time from door to take off, your in-airport experience, and what happens once you land.
This is where the complexity lies: the integration and scaling is challenging due to the sheer amount of unique databases used by each airport. Moreover, integration is required with ancillary data providers like the TSA, Google Maps, and Lyft.
My role
As the Design Lead, I orchestrate the delivery of numerous project activities and engage with client stakeholders regularly. For this project, the main stakeholder is the Head of Innovation at Southwest.
My scope
Research design
Quantitative and qualitative research methods
Reporting and prioritisation (by tech effort, user needs, and business priority - the latter dictated by the Marketing department, not Southwest Innovation)
Management of visual designer and offshore development team
Co-workers: Kyle Taylor (Senior UI Designer) and an offshore development team in India.
The work
User
Research.
We interviewed customers the day of travel at an airport - to understand their needs in the right place, at the right time. These were semi-structured interviews, which included elements of Usability Testing.
Insights
Report.
Key user insights were distilled into a formalised report. I can’t share this publically, but I’d happily chat about it in person - just get in touch.
Workshop
with users.
We also ran workshops with customers to better understand the pain points and opportunities across their travel journey. This also included a prioritisation exercise.
Research
Playbook.
We designed a research playbook so Southwest Innovation can continue best practice user research once Deloitte Digital rolls off this engagement. The playbook covers both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and includes numerous templates:
Recruitment brief
Research schedule
Usability testing moderation guide
Customer panel moderation guide
NDA and consent forms for research participants
Guidelines for report preparation
It also includes guidance on when each method should be used, based on the research question.
Moreover, the playbook was created custom to demonstrate how research fits into the client’s existing design and development cycle.
Creative
Concepts.
The visual designers fed the research insights into the designs. Please note: not all features visible here are currently live.
This is a sample of the screens delivered in response to research findings.
The outcome.
We are currently working on a new release.
You can download the beta version of the app here.
