EXPERIENCE

During the summer of 2018, I joined the E-commerce team at Alaska Airlines as a Product Design intern. I designed, tested, and implemented upon the guest experience of purchasing a Saver Fare, which is similar to the basic economy fares offered by other airlines. The goal was to identify and understand Saver Fare related user pain points when trying to purchase a flight ticket, in hopes of creating positive experiences that met both guest and business needs.

I cross-communicated with UX Designers, Researchers, and Developers to design and implement Alaska Airlines’ new Saver Fare into their current responsive product line. After I had a solid understanding of the Saver Fare, I lead a new project where I explored different ways of implementing Saver Fare into Alaska Airlines’ future responsive mobile and desktop seat-maps.

Responsibilities

Problem

Alaska Airlines introduced Saver Fares to provide low cost airline tickets to it’s customers. With this new addition, there were now varying tickets that included several advantages and disadvantages that needed to be outlined for users to understand what they were paying for.

SOLUTION

Create an access point on the available flight page to allow users to easily find and compare the different benefits of each fare.

STARTING POINT

Saver Fare was a new addition to Alaska Airlines, and one of my early projects during my intership was identifying how to help users find the compare fares link using the FPO (for placement only) space on the page.

Competitive Analysis

Being new to the airlines industry, I began reading articles about different fare types and how our competitors guide their users to understand the different fares offered. I quickly realized that a majority of the airlines placed their “compare fares” link to the right side of  the page near the other fare types.

I took this pattern in consideration, as I hoped to implement an intuitive design solution.

Team discussion

In the process of discovering different ways to bring attention to the compare fare link, I recommended moving the link closer to users line of sight while selecting the fare type. I received push back due to time constraints as well as the dev effort it would take to restructure the page.

With that in mind, I recognized that I was placed in a position to identify the best experience for users in consideration of the constraints.

Design Explorations

Prior to jumping into the design exploration stage, I reviewed the existing personas that helped me understand who I was catering this experience for. Throughout this phase, I questioned myself, “how can I make this area stand out without taking too much attention from the users?”

Here are some of my explorations that focus on placing an illustration or image utilizing the FPO space:

User Testing

Through user testing we learned that the location of the link wasn’t noticeable for our users, so it didn’t matter what we were placing in the FPO area. Users  were  expecting to find the compare fares link near the different fare types.

Delivered Design

Based on our research findings/recommendations I decided to move the location of the link near the other fares. My final design solution was used as reference for developers to push this product to market and allow users to use this highly impactful feature.

‍The compare fare feature lives in Alaska Airlines product today, and is a key way for users to identify the advantages and disadvantages of their fare.

Furthermore, this internship and my wonderful team challenged me as a designer and my solution driven thinking. During this internship I had the opportunity to strengthen and learn more about design processes, design thinking, product thinking, and interaction design. Most importantly, in practice I was able to execute big problems from a user centered point of view, while working with interdisciplinary teams.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss the details of my experience/projects.