Airline Ancillaries
The Context 💭
Airlines have migrated away from all inclusive fares to a world of ancillaries. This allows the traveler to customize a journey that best suits them and their budget while optimizing airline revenue through incremental ancillary sales. I was tasked with renovating the current ancillaries page for Sabre's white-label product, Digital Experience (DX), to allow for flexible and personalized ancillary shopping. This will lead to an enhanced journey for the user and increased revenue for the airline.
Goals 🎯
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Increase the purchase of ancillaries while improving customer satisfaction.
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Provide an easy to navigate structure to increase task success rates.
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Provide personalized and relevant offers to the traveler.
Requirements & Research 📋
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Reviewed persona library and past usability studies with UX researcher to understand users.
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Explored the product currently and uncovered other examples in the industry.
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Met with product managers and technical leads to understand requirements and constraints and validate user flows.
Key learnings
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Not all users may want to explore ancillaries. Some may even view it as a roadblock to booking their tickets. Must make sure it is easy to advance while also making it enticing to explore.
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Differentiation between bundles and single ancillaries. Make bundles stand out and show their value. Currently, bundles do not easily stand out in our page of ancillaries.
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Big to small, airlines could have it all. Airlines have used this product in with a wide variety of amenities from a handful to dozens. The solution must be able to provide flexibility to handle varying amounts of amenities.
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Personalization is important. The business wants to make sure we put forward a personalized approach with the current technlogy we have available. We must make the user feel that these offers are relevant to them.
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Accessibility is always key. Our design language accounts for most accessibility but is also important to keep accessibility front of mind.
Current state of airline ancillaries
Here is what the product looked like before the refresh.
Design ✍️
After completing research and defining requirements, I worked with product, tech and within my UX team to iterate on my design concepts.
Approval ✅
Present and sell design decisions to stakeholders. Show how design is able to achieve both business goals and create the best experience for users all within the technical limitations of the team. May have to come back to the team for a further design reviews if changes are needed.
Design and annotations will be delivered. After the approval is complete, I will deliver the design along with detailed annotations of components, custom CSS, padding, coloring and typography.
The Final Design ✨
Our final design we delivered included many new features across different touch points in the user's journey.
Easy discoverability & comprehension
Instead of just having all of the ancillaries in one big group, I decided to group them in stages of user's trip from pre-boarding to booking trip insurance. I also differentiated between single upgrades and bundles with badges, different colored backgrounds on the page and making the tiles different sizes.
Differentiating offers
To call attention to specific offers, airlines can now enable a recommended styling that shows recommendations based on previous shopping patterns. Airlines can also call out popular upgrade options with a badge as well.
Flexibility with flights
The new design allows flexibility for users to upgrade for only one leg of their trip. Use the modify button to easily make changes to your selections.
Not interested in upgrades?
Use the skip to payment button to skip over all of these offers with ease.
Suggest offers at relevant times
Now airlines can surface offers above the seat map. This can be especially relevant if a bundle includes an upgraded seat.
Validation User Testing 👍
Key learnings
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Page layout and organization was logical and easy to follow, and the new top navigation bar was very well received
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Concept of bundles was very well received with. users expressing interest in getting more for their money when paying for extras.
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Clear how to add a bundle for the trip; from hitting the ‘add’ button, using the toggle to split out the return flight, to selecting passengers, users easily understood and completed the process.
Key learnings
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Was rated 6.5 out of 7 for ease of use and 6.7 out of 7 for satisfaction for both desktop and mobile combined.
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0 high and medium severity findings. 4 low severity findings. 11 positive observations.
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Zero task failure on desktop and mobile.