Helping India's leading budget airline's ticketing experience take-off with UX design

Our brief: Create a mobile-first, 60-second check-out journey

India’s leading budget airline, was suffering the consequences of a poor interface with low affordance value and click-through conversions. A simple heuristic evaluation of the interaction design led us to some painful revelations. Not only was the booking experience too lengthy, but the simple act of finding a call-to-action was also tedious. Booking a ticket on the website, was frustrating and highly turbulent for business.

Inheriting the challenges of a legacy software successfully

The base code for an airline is an intricate maze of APIs and it would take up to a year, if we took an IT agnostic approach – a luxury no airline brand can afford. Our challenge was to maximize value for users and business, with minimum tech-related changes. To ensure agile design development, a usability test was proposed to be conducted every fortnight. The timeline? A tight 20 weeks to deliver.

Identifying the gaps through User Research

We used a combination of ethnographic and UX methodologies to derive the core problem statement. A matrix of users was created to map the pain-points that deeply affected each of them.

From interviewing the target audience to digital audits for the website, eye-tracking and observational studies, it took us close to 3 weeks to isolate core issues and prioritise them as per user impact and business conversion. We finalised a primary user journey and some secondary micro journeys to resolve, that would absolve the experience of pain-points in the main booking journey, 'web check-in' and 'manage bookings' journey for retail users.

Conceptualising and prototyping the solution

With a pre-planned 2 week iterative sprint, we worked on multiple concepts with quick wire-framing and prototyping that was rapidly tested with users by our client.

We iterated efficiently along with our IT partner for gaining feedback from users. By having the product and business team sit and work together with our design team – progress was fast and focus remained clear. Access to in-depth knowledge about the IT processes was critical. Everything needed to happen as a single unified team, leveraging a simultaneous process. Every iteration was an opportunity for alignment and rapid decision-making.

Designing the graphical user interface, and testing it.

We created a new digital identity solving for some critical readability issues, especially on mobile devices. The new branding was well received and was further extended by the client in the offline communication channels. The most important aspect was the pricing ribbon that had to be iterated over 2 months based on live user feedback from the testing sprints.

The final booking flow was tested rigorously with about 100 users for time to transaction and ease of navigation. Great team and brain-storming with our client enabled us to create mobile first interfaces that catered to the behaviour of mobile ticketing. Over a period one year, we changed almost 50% of the airline's website experience.