This airline handles thousands of customer issues each day by phone. However, the primary tool that customer service specialists use is over 10 years old and carries many inefficiencies.
Cancellation. It is the second highest ranking reason why customers call. However, specialists continually reported problems with cancelling passengers/flights/segments and the client Product team wanted us to investigate.
The system complexity, driven by a vast set of institutional rules, was certainly a challenge to mention. To surmount this, I created cheat sheets and lunch-n-learns to preface design work. We also created flow charts before any wireframes to make sure we could articulate how the solution worked.
Upon embarking on this project, I held stakeholder interviews to not only ground myself in the product, but to understand my coworkers' hopes, dreams, and expectations. Through these interviews, I was able to identify some crucial research activities:
The results were in! Two thematic pieces of feedback were:
I thought it would be best for us to build a set of Task Analyses from the interview recordings to measure and mark a few key metrics before and after design was complete:
From this phase we were able to uncover several problems. The top two were...
While synthesizing the research, I also wanted to draft a UX Strategy Blueprint* for the entire product. This would allow the team to clearly outline the product's plan and establish design guiding principles. These principles were essential to the subsequent tasks in design, and we constantly referred to them when evaluating concepts. These were our top "Guiding Principles":
*Thank you Jim Kalbach for creating this template!
During concept testing, specialists loved having Miles information on hand. Previously, they had to go into another system to fetch this information. We determined which aspects of the information were commonly needed and supplied a visual representation to enable quick understanding. This aligned with our strategic guiding principles as well.
With easy access to specialists, the design process felt rewarding. That being said, we had to be mindful with the specialists' time. To arrive at our solution, our team:
The user flow below demonstrates removing a single passenger from a flight with the final design (anonymized):
We arrived our final design by iterative testing with real specialists via usertesting.com. Our final design was tested with 5 Specialists from 5 different customer service groups. We found no thematic usability issues and measured our original metrics in task analyses. We found we had decreased all metrics!
2 months after deployment, the team measured success and found the following:
One thing I found particular success with was tying the design rationale back to the UX Strategy. The client really appreciated the correlation and it gave the strategy more weight as the project progressed.