Airport Chat
Client
Alaska Airlines
Timeline
3 months
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
Product Manager
User Researcher
Overview
Getting flights off the ground requires a lot of communication between many different groups. Current solutions for that are convoluted, messy, and inconsistent.
We wanted to explore how they are currently managing this communication problem to understand what we could do to create a better solution.
Uncovering the problems
I went to multiple airports to chat with many different personas and uncover how they are currently communicating with each other.
As the different sizes of airports have different challenges, I interviewed 25 people in SEA, PDX, and LAX I found a few running themes.
Multiple ways to communicate
Different airports and groups at the same airports have a variety of ways to communicate. This is leaving airport leadership to have to come up with their own systems.
Unsure who to contact
Not everyone working a flight knew the names of everyone else working the same flight, making it difficult to communicate with the right person. If a baggage agent needed to ask the gate agent about gate checked bags, for example, it was difficult to mange.
Using Third-Party Platforms
Every airport I spoke to was using a third party platform to communicate with each other, like Google Chat, WhatsApp, Apple Messages, and others. Some airports even provided employees money monthly to cover their personal device charges related to communication.
Competitve Analysis
I spent some time reviewing some existing chat apps on different sizes and analyzed them, generating a list of things seen that would work with our application and things that would not.
Business Opportunity
Now that we have a basic idea of what we want to build, I took a beat to analyze the information we had along with what our internal Alaska Airlines goals are for the next 5 years.
Company-Wide Solution
The chat system we come up with needs to be flexible and expandable throughout the entire company. We have a lot of different user bases that could all need to communicate with each other.
I chose to keep the app oriented around flights as that is at the root of the vast majority of communication. There are still other users that might not be operating within flights, so we need something that works for them as well.
Keep Employee Data Internal
Our employees were communicating with each other on their own persona devices, which is something we needed to avoid doing. There are so many policy issues with continuing this method, so the need to create an alternative solution was vital.
We also found that some airports were sanctioning third party tools to support communication, even providing money for their monthly phone bills to support this. The need for a new version was clear.
Ideations
Using low fidelity mockups, I quickly explored a few different options for how we can solve the problems laid out above while keeping our business goals in mind.
These provided a good talking point not only for my Product Manager and I, but also our developers as we begun to involve them in this process.
Design & Prototype
In-App Integration
Many of our airport employees use existing apps during their work, so I wanted to incorporate the chats relevant to the flights they have open accessible. This keeps our users all communicating without having to go to a separate app to do so.
Incorporating AI
Quick Responses
Generated based on your role, the timeline of the flight, and prior chats.
Image Analysis
Responses based on images you take. Example showing dog picture prompting sharing with guest.
Summaries
Overview of everything you need to know from prior flight on that plane.
Components
Outcomes
I presented our work to directors at Alaska
First app integrated
By showing the proof of value of our vision, we were able to get buy-in to start integrating our first app into this system.
Long term plan established
Work was then shown to other designers and PMs at different groups of the company, allowing us all to see the vision and work towards the fully integrated company-wide solution we imagine.
