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Air Lux booking experience

Using the UX design process to identify opportunities to improve the airline booking experience for users, in order to give a startup a competitive edge in the industry.

Client:
UX Design Institute — UX Diploma project
Role:
Research, analysis, testing

Project goal

The goal was to create a competitive advantage for a startup airline, by identifying the existing problems faced by users in the booking journey for short haul European flights – and creating a more positive experience.
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The UX design process

The process started with research to fully understand the scenario, followed by analysis to clearly define the problem in order to form a hypothesis for a solution, which could then be designed, prototyped, and tested.

95%
Of respondents booked some form of luggage
""
They try to sell you things you don't want. It can be very confusing.
USER JOURNEY:
Airline homepage
Search results
Fare selection
Additional services
Checkout
""
It's tricky, they always try to hide the prices – its a lot more money than I had originally expected.
70.6%
Don't normally pay for their seat preference

Research findings

Research methodologies included:

  1. Competitive benchmarking
  2. Customer surveys
  3. User interviews
  4. User testing
Context
Prior to commencing the booking journey, users would exhaustively search to find the cheapest deals that aligned with their itinerary.
User goals
For the short haul, European market, users only wanted flights and did not require other services, such as hotels, transport or events. Trips were booked for budget holidays, or visiting family and friends.
Motivations
Price was a priority factor and users wanted to keep cost low. Only basic luggage upgrades were prioritised.

Market opportunity

Pain points
The user experience was generally well-optimised, but frustrations peaked at the fare selection and additional services sections, where it became evident that maximising revenue was the airlines' main focus as users became overwhelmed. Three key issues were identified:
  1. Lack of pricing transparency.
    Airlines wouldn't always show the full cost of the booking criteria, resulting in unexpected price growth. Deceptive UX patterns and aggressive upselling would make it difficult for users to make clear decisions.
  2. Confusing luggage options.
    Airlines would offer different fare bundles and use the visual design to emphasis more expensive packages - making it difficult to understand what was included, and impossible to select single items.
  3. Overwhelming upselling
    Users were continuously overwhelmed, with an array of additional services, even though not required or previously declined.

By solving these pain points, it would create a better experience for users - and help gain a competitive advantage in the market.

The price quoted is only true for one passenger, one way - after the cost multiplies.
Scale and colour influence the user into selecting an undesired action.
Even if declined, it was common to see the same offerings pop-up.

Solutions

Prioritising high frequency use cases for seat selection

Common industry convention required users to select their seat, at a cost, or proceed with a freely assigned seat.

However, research showed however that 70.6% of respondents would not pay for their seat preference, but due to of a lack of prioritisation, and in attempt to make more sales, extra steps were included that frustrated the majority of users.

The solution would reverse this pattern and highlight an automatically assigned free seat. An option to change the seat at a cost would add extra steps to the journey for edge case users.

This new booking flow would respect the users time and decisions - and cut 30% of the steps by prioritising the needs of these high frequency use cases.

A booking journey thats tailored and respectful to its users

No extra services would be offered for before and after departure as research showed users would prefer to book these services elsewhere. Flight customisations would instead be optimised and prioritised:

  1. Additional services.
    The new customer journey would focus on completing sales and would only offer additional service as an option before checkout. This would preserve the time and goodwill of the majority of users, whilst still offering the services for edge cases.
  2. Luggage.
    To meet user needs, luggage items would be sold individually, and would be customisable for each person and flight if required. The product tiles would display how many items the users were allowed, the weight, size and where it would be stowed.

Cost and progress transparency

With pricing being a key issue, a flight itinerary module would remain fixed throughout the booking journey to counter existing frustrations and to give users more control by:

  1. Acting as a progress marker, helping guide users through the journey and manage expectations;
  2. Allowing users to see and understand the cost breakdown of their trip, customisations, and the total cost throughout.

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