An extension of the existing Southwest app that offers transparent and personable guidance to customers after a flight.
Context: This was a 4-week project for a senior Experience Design course.
Roles: Interface Design, Experience Design, Research + Strategy
Team: Angus Lei, David Kwon, Marine Au-Yeung, Rocky Shah, Shannon Boyd
The Proposal
Southwest Touchdown is an extension of the existing Southwest app that engages customers post-flight, offering timely information and guidance at their destination. Touchdown offers baggage tracking, destination guides, and a personalized gift to fliers, reinforcing the charismatic impression of the Southwest brand.
Business Problem
Southwest Airlines is the world's largest low-cost airline carrier. Southwest entered the airline industry as an industry disruptor when they introduced their low-budget business model. In addition to the low-cost model, their success is attributed to stellar customer service and a charismatic brand. However, the industry landscape is changing and competing legacy airlines are closing the gap on Southwest’s established advantages.
Business Opportunity
In response to the changing industry landscape, Southwest is adapting to challenge the legacy carriers. Beginning in 2015, Southwest began expansion into international markets and offering more long-haul flights. The long-haul flight market is substantial, fast-growing and lucrative. There is a large new consumer base Southwest can reach, but in order to encroach upon territory held by legacy airlines Southwest has a need to differentiate themselves as they compete for a new consumer market.
Research and Insights
After analyzing the business problem of Southwest from different perspectives; brand, history, values, competitors and overall industry, our team identified two key insights.
The first insight was a unique brand differentiator. By establishing a hiring process for personable, empathetic and caring people, Southwest has developed a company culture that translates to a positive experience for fliers. Southwest employees are encouraged to express their unique personalities, and instances of this have been documented in numerous viral videos filmed by customers who relished the experience, e.g., [1], [2], [3]. We could leverage this brand pillar to reinforce the existing Southwest experience.
The second insight was a sector-wide problem. Research into the context of the airline industry uncovered neglect for the post-flight customer experience. Competing airlines have placed an emphasis on developing both in-flight and pre-flight experiences for a customer’s journey. Speculative designs from established agencies also followed this pattern, e.g.,[1], [2]. Our team saw an opportunity to address needs of customers during a portion of their journey that is routine, wearisome, or stressful. Intervening at the end of the journey also provided an opportunity to form a lasting impression. Finally, we also saw an opportunity to establish precedence for other travel channels and providing value with an unexpected touchpoint.
Think with Google, (2017).
Process
With our design opportunity in mind, we utilized the Google Ventures Sprint process to find a specific audience. Drawing from our own experiences, information gathered from ThinkWithGoogle and SAP, and responses from research questions fielded on Reddit and Quora, our team developed our understanding of traveler's thoughts and feelings after a flight. A key step in this stage was to think outside the demographics established in the aviation industry, namely business vs leisure fliers and long-haul vs short haul fliers. Our team noticed the research reflected our experiences of traveling, that travelers are becoming more fickle with their airline choices and basing decisions more on pricing opportunities.
Our persona was developed as an amalgamation of user research responses, statistics and our own experiences.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Using insights from our Sprint process we developed a persona to design for. With this persona in mind, we sketched concepts and features on paper to ideate rapidly. From these ideas, we developed low fidelity prototypes to validate our feature designs with users and to test visual hierarchy and layout decisions.
High-Fidelity Mockup Testing
We progressed from low-fidelity prototypes to high fidelity mockups, then uploaded onto InVision to solicit further user feedback. We noticed business and leisure-oriented travelers differed in their opinion of the value of the features. Business fliers appreciated the baggage information, whilst leisure fliers saw greater value in the guides.
Interface Breakdown
Baggage Tracker
Providing transparent baggage status information gives travelers a sense of certainty and security, lowering cognitive overhead and a need to rush, affording the time to plan for their next steps. Information is made glanceable, and further detail can be easily expanded. Steps for further help if necessary are also easily found.
Southwest Recommends
Guides by local southwest employees act as personal recommendations from a friend that extend the sense of easy-going care travelers experienced in-flight. As they navigate the airport and beyond, travelers can access curated destinations, complete with videos of the employee's enthusing about their picks, and Yelp reviews to provide further credibility.
Heart of Travel
Heart of Travel is an existing Southwest offering for frequent fliers that created a piece of digital artwork to visualize a fliers flight paths. We wanted to increase the visibility of this great feature by offering it all fliers by incorporating a baggage tag scan element as a means of populating new flight paths.
Explore Destinations
Although our research found a saturation of pre-flight booking designs, we still noted an opportunity to create a loyal customer out of fickle fliers by reconnecting travelers to a future trip with Southwest. The exploration section uses vivid imagery to help users imagine a new destination and continues to offer enticing price points to match existing customer behaviour.
Reflections
This project was an introduction to user experience design for our team. It provided a great opportunity to learn about the connections between business and design, as well as the importance of designing with considerations for changes over time. Moving forward, we plan on developing alternate states for Southwest Touchdown, to account for customers who don't have flights booked or are returning to their home city.