LET IT FLY! Redesigning Virgin Atlantic’s flying experience

Case study

A BIT OF CONTEXT

This is a pet product accelerator project for ideation and validation. The goal was around integrating Virgin Atlantic’s in-flight services in a mobile app offering a seamless flight journey to the eend-user

THE BRIEF

Virgin Atlantic currently flies 5.4 million passengers yearly. The success of their business strategy requires the company to build on its foundations. They focus on the business and leisure markets, driving efficiency and effectiveness.

THE CONCERN

Currently, the in-flight services are:

• Manual (food and drinks service, summoning an attendant)
• Dependent on the built-in technology (movies, music, games, maps)

Virgin Atlantic wants to make all their in-flight services available on mobile.

THE UX TEAM & THE SCHEDULE

We worked on this project for two weeks:

• Week 1: Discovery and definition sprint. This included project canvas, project plan and business analysis. Also a survey, user interviews, affinity diagram, personas, experience maps and design studio.
• Week 2: Development and delivery sprint. This included paper prototypes, mid-fidelity prototypes, mock-ups and a high-fidelity clickable prototype. We did several iterations and usability tests.

During this sprint, I was involved in all the design process but also played the role of team facilitator. I made sure everybody was on the same page and everything was aligned with the project plan.

That’s us! From right to left: Stefano, Dafna and me, Chaymae on the left

OUR APPROACH

We formed our approach to the problem based on Virgin Atlantic’s core values.

“We always aim to go beyond the norm to deliver unforgettable experiences for our customers.” — Virgin Atlantic

Our aim was to create a mobile app that reflects these values and that covers the business need.

RESEARCH

SURVEY

To get the research phase started, we made a survey that we shared across social media channels. We got 60 responders.

We started the survey with a screener question, asking people whether they had already taken a long-distance flight. This question helped us excludes the 11% of the responders who did not match our target.

INTERVIEWS

We interviewed 11 people. We conducted the interviews by phone with people who live outside London. We recorded the sessions using the Call Recorder mobile app.

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

We grouped the data from the interviews into different categories. That helped us get a better understanding of our end users.

ARCHETYPE USERS

From the affinity map, we inferred that we had three categories of customers. We created three personas to represent them.

Claudia, our primary archetype user. She flies often to New York from Hong Kong for work and uses her flight time for work and entertainment.

Bob is our secondary archetype user. He’s an IT consultant and travels often for work and conferences. Bob likes spending his entire flights watching movies and TV shows.

Anna travels less often than Claudia and Bob. When she does, she likes smooth boarding and comfortable flights.

Here’s a storyboard that summarizes our archetype users’ pain points.

Sketched by Stephano

APPROACH TO SOLVING THE PROBLEM

The solution to Claudia, Bob and Anna’s pain points, is to build an app that solves the challenges they face.

“Build an app that helps Virgin Atlantic’s passengers have a seamless and entertaining flight” — The UX team

FEATURE PRIORITIZATION

We wrote down all the feature ideas based on the research findings and sorted them by category. It helped us define our MVP for this sprint.

DESIGN STUDIO

For this design studio, we focused on two main flows:

1. Seamless flight journey where Claudia doesn’t need to interrupt her shopping at the airport. The gate information is available on her phone. She doesn’t need to check the airport display anymore.

2. Exceptional entertainment flying experience for Bob. He chooses a movie to watch and controls the built-in screen from his phone.

OUTCOMES FROM DESIGN STUDIO

By the end of the design studio, we came up with a paper prototype ready for testing.

1. Prototype for the seamless flight journey

2. Prototype for the exceptional entertainment flying experience

PAPER PROTOTYPE TESTING

We tested the prototype. We found some issues around the language used and the navigation. People were confused when trying to pair the phone with the built-in screen:

• Confusing language
• Complex navigation
• Confusing pairing process of the phone with the plane’s built-in screen

We decided to do a step back and review our app structure. After a small brainstorming session, we came up with a new app map.

APP MAP

We simplified the navigation and reduced the number of pages. We also removed the manual pairing system and replaced it with an automated one.

MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

Now that we did our new app map, we were excited to see its effectiveness. We did another design studio and we came up with a simpler interface.

1. Seamless flight journey

2. Exceptional entertainment flying experience

MID-FIDELITY USABILITY TESTING

The new prototype seemed to work much better. We kept iterating until we felt confident taking the wireframes to a high-fidelity level.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THE BRAND

Each one of us opened Sketch. We played with colors and styles based on the design that Stefano initiated.

OUTCOMES FROM DESIGN STUDIO

We came up with 15 designs. We did a design critique for each design and decided to merge the elements we voted for in one main design. We kept in mind Virgin Atlantic’s brand identity.

USABILITY TESTING OUTCOMES

The problem with this design was around accessibility. Some elements are hard to read and there wasn’t enough contrast between colors in some cases:

• Text difficult to read
• Icons on bottom navigation don’t stand out due to lack of contrast
• The hight of bottom navigation is too big.

FINAL DESIGN

In the new design, we solved the problems that came up during the usability testing. We made the text bigger and the titles bolder and we reduced the navigation bar height.

We came up with two different user interface design options:

OPTION 1

In this option, we tried to keep the appealing bright colours of Virgin Atlantic. We improved the readability in the navigation menu by contrasting the colours. Selected elements in the navigation menu are now red and stand out from the non-selected elements in a purple background.

OPTION 2

We did a minimalistic approach for option 2. I think this design looks clean and professional. We kept the bright red of Virgin but broke it a little bit with a darker red on a white background.

We did more research in the iconography and opted for refinement. Instead of coloured background and filled icons, we now have non-filled icons by default. Once selected, the icon is filled with red and the text becomes bold.

WRAP-UP TIME

It was challenging to come up with a solution for a brief with as many problems to cover in one go. Ultimately, we managed to do it. We shared the prototype with people who have been working in the industry for years and their return was very positive about both the UX and UI.

If you liked this case study, you might also like another one I wrote for my client project Fitness revisited, spotlight on the new Body You Collective mobile app.

In the meanwhile, I will leave you with this quote from Virgin Atlantic.

“It’s about following your dreams, seeking new experiences and turning your ideas into reality.”

— Virgin Atlantic

Before you go!

If you liked this article, clap and share. Get in touch if you have any questions or any examples you want to share.

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Lastly, I created www.idir.co.uk to help people reduce stress and unwind using highly concentrated CBD products. I’m working on our case study and I will share the tips of dealing with e-commerce platforms as soon as I finish it. Stay tuned ;)