Epic Stories

Our Role

We were part of the Digital 2020 program: new digital touchpoints, including a completely redesigned website platform; an offer management platform with a merchandising engine; and new marketing platforms to manage the digital guest experience and generate personalized messages and offers. Within this program, we delivered high-level research, ideas, and feasibility studies on all of the above. To accomplish this, we conducted interviews with customers, guided creative sessions with multiple stakeholders, built prototypes and MVPs, and conducted user tests and quantitative research. We then ensured that stakeholders could make further steps with these insights and resources. After the initial research, we led the UI/Visual designers in developing their deliverables to the developers in India. This was a process that we needed to set up to ensure delivery. What began as a hands-on process grew to our clients becoming a functional UI team in their own right. For this project, we worked jointly in the Netherlands, Abu Dhabi, and India.

Problem statement

Improve digital channels before 2020. The airline has neglected their digital channels for some time. As result, the airline has old systems and has missed opportunities and chances for growth. With the Digital 2020 plan, the company wants to improve the experience, add touchpoints, add products, grow Abu Dhabi as a destination, cut costs, and maintain its level of service.

New website: content interaction

At the start of our project, the first task was a new website. The question was, "We're moving to a new CMS; can we do a lift and shift first?" The first thought was, "Moving it from one place to another is not really helpful." But this was an opportunity to really improve, and improve not based on a medium but on a topic.

We started looking at the numerous content topics and checked the analytics and call center data. We wanted a topic that really needed UX attention to improve. Baggage was by far the most fitting topic for us to research, a topic with a lot of questions around it. But we needed more input to really improve. We began with interviews—with just listening and viewing, we had some very useful insights. One of them was the fact that half of the people misused the booking tool to find flight information about issues such as baggage.

Stopover: A strategic product for Abu Dhabi

Stopover: A strategic product for Abu Dhabi – A stopover is when a user needs to transfer from one flight to another. For a hub like Abu Dhabi, this is very common. By extending a stopover by a few days, it could become an extra holiday within a holiday. This is what makes this a strategic product for destination Abu Dhabi.

We started with user and stakeholder interviews, as we always do to get insights before sketching any ideas. We call this our "divine and understand" phase. After our interviews, we realized that stopovers have a different meaning all over the world. Whereas in Australia, it's something common due to longer flights, in Europe, it's seen as an option for cheaper flights.

Most airlines have stopover products, especially when they are connected with a city or country. Singapore is often mentioned as a great example. After our benchmark, we saw that none of the other airlines made a real attempt to sell stopovers in their key user flows. Most of the time, it's a hidden flow. After multiple tests in search/bookings flow, we found just the right time and place that made a significant increase in stopover bookings without impacting the conversion. Both in qualitative and quantitative tests.

We found four things we needed to get right: (1) If someone wants a connection flight in the next twelve hours, don't bother them with stopovers. (2) Make the offer inspirational, not transactional (make the offer about the experience of the destination rather than the airline product). (3) Don't make them think too much; have a really simple choose flow. (4) Show them they are still making progress toward their main destination. These four factors were found by doing more than 20 user tests around different concepts. After we found the right stopover placements and concepts, we moved to generating more traffic, which means more people seeing the stopover offers. This is done by smart algorithms, destination marketing, and retargeting. One of the successes was increasing the conversion of stopovers from 0.08% to 2.3%.

Extra overlay between search and search results

Holidays: Gaining growth

The company growth lies in launching additional products, not so much in the airline itself. Holidays are part of this—selling accommodations, activities, car rentals, and more. This is not a new concept, but just like this airline, no airline has truly succeeded in this.

In our first phase, we realized that this would mean a shift in purpose from airline to retailer, at least for the digital part of the company—from one product to a multi-product retailer. Airlines basically have a single flow checkout for searching and booking flights. For retailers, this doesn't work. Users want to explore, browse, save, and then book their personal holiday. Not doing any research could lead to easy solutions like these.

One account: Building a relationship

How can you build a long-lasting relationship with your customers? A difficult question to answer, but it's what most companies want. Airlines like you to become a member of their loyalty program. But to truly benefit from an airline's loyalty program, you need to fly multiple times in a year with them. Most of us don't fly that much.

And signing up for an airline loyalty program could mean filling in a form with up to 27 fields. To compare, for other branches, it's a short as two.

In essence, a loyalty program should be designed to offer rewards and incentives that move customers along to a better relationship.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Don't worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what's going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don't hear your own voice in your head, that's a good sign you still have more work to do. No, users are only willing to share more personal data about themselves if a direct advantage comes from the use of that data. They are willing to accept cookies if their flight searches are saved for them. They are willing to give an email address in exchange for a price alert. And users long for central and easy-to-access places to change and/or delete their data. All of this is then considered a fair relationship.

You can understand the benefits for a company like this one. No wonder there was a unanimous buy-in for a solution like one account. But most stakeholders had some hesitation due to the size of the proposed project—so we proposed to build the vision feature-by-feature, showing direct value for new and existing customers to get a taste of a real relationship. This also fit much better into our overall vision, bringing important features in line with the rest of the content. It's odd how often content and action are separated; a seat map rarely shows me why I should pay extra for that seat.

Would you register an account with an airline?

What would encourage you to join an airline's loyalty program?

Would you like to enter additional data about yourself so that we can help you with the booking choices you are currently making?

What do you feel about airlines collecting data about you, e.g., how you book flights and the choices you make?