Alaska Airlines
Loyalty & Orion — Building a cohesive design system and loyalty experience in tandum
When I joined Alaska Airlines, I was tasked with an array of responsibilities on the product, focusing on the build-out of a whole new design system (Orion), while embedded with the Account team on evolving the Loyalty Experience. It was a multifaceted role, which allowed me to see where we are exposing holes in our experience and what challenges we get to solve.
Before this refocus, Alaska found itself consistently inconsistent, using outdated styles and components. There was also lacking documentation as a source of truth for designers and developers to share.
A symptom of this, the account experience became stale and users were unable to relate. In addition, the frequently redundant and incorrect content affected its usage and created an increase in volume to the call center.
Change is a force that inspires us to create success. In Nov 2016, Alaska acquired an opposing player in the game, Virgin America. Their core demographic was one that Alaska had not given attention to, than unattainable to reach. This was a challenge that Alaska Airlines embraced.
Within this process, I was also focused on building the mileage tier badge system. Having the badge identity brings in a visual identifier for the uses to relate to.
Process
Discovery & Research
Design system strategy
Design exploration
Testing
Continued ideation
While leading the account design experience, we had encouraging collaboration across the full team of product designers. From this, I was able to be involved with the IA restructure and focus group studies. This helped develop the mental model principles, low-fi user testing, and design system testing.
Responsibilities:
Product Design
Visual Design
Research
Testing
Challenges
Business priorities and scope dependencies
Building a design system with separate product teams
Project goals
Learn more about our core customers
Live active order status
Sustainable order placement
Discovery
What we know
Guest’s get hung up on the obvious material and experience.
Non-elites want to know how to level up and Elites want dynamic status.
Design Principles: Simple + Consistent + Relevant + Engaging
What we don’t
What content and visual cues can our non-members, non-elites, and elites related to.
Testing will expose and validate this.
Who and what does this effect
Loyalty stakeholders, product and delivery teams.
Business goals; reaching and reflecting.
The outcome: Current guests, non-members, and acquired Virgin guests.
Leveling up the account experience with recognizing the different information based on the guest membership tier.
Historically, the Alaska Airlines Account experience was designed with business goals first. Now, with the effort of being the voice for the customer, this allowed the team to use user research to guide the UX thinking. We embraced the unknowns with user testing and focus groups.
While in the process of creating content blocks and wireframes, I soon found out how to break down the different types of “Mileage Members” and valuable and helpful information for each.
