1. Introduction
Background
In the wake of Virgin America’s acquisition by Alaska Airlines, Pan Am sees an opportunity opening up for a flying experience that’s a cut above the usual. They plan on launching a new airline in 12-18 months and are looking for a streamlined, well-thought-out user experience to match. Although an app is in the long-term roadmap, it’s not the first focus at the moment. Instead, Pan Am wants to start with a responsive site that doesn’t force users to download and install anything. However, something they would like to look into is how to offer notifications to users in real time since they believe that could improve the user experience around issues, such as flight delays and gate changes.
Research Goals
I am looking to learn about competitor companies such as Jetblue, Frontier Airlines, American Airlines, and United Airways to see what trends they are following in terms of their overall design layout. I will review main functionalities such as search, booking, and online check-in. I will also compare branding in order to redesign the Pan Am Airways with a more modern feel, keeping the essence of it still alive.
Methodologies
The research methods I will use are market research, affinity map, contextual inquiries, user feedback.
Participants
My ideal participants for this project would be any race or gender between ages 18-65. College student with a part-time job, a news reporter in his late 20’s, an office employee mid 30’s in a design company, a salesman in his 40’s, and a retired grandfather is his 60’s that still dresses trendy, is tech savvy but is also a bargain hunter. I will begin my research with user interviews to get a solid foundation of pros and cons about competitor sites, contextual inquiries to know how user friendly a site is, and market research to check competitor’s success rates. This process should take about a week since I have the candidates ready for interviews and surveys. I will then begin with a Lo Fi landing page prototype containing the users’ information
Sketch of Landing Page
Empathy Research
5 participants were used for the research:
Research Debrief: Pan Am Airways
One of the common factors that all participants shared is the use of their iPhone for e- commerce whether it’s to search or purchase products.
4 out of 5 almost always prefer making their purchases online for flights because they did not like travel agencies.
2 out of 5 did not have the time to visit agencies because of their busy lives.
1 out of 5 used his smartphone predominantly for searching but would not purchase
because he felt the process to be very cumbersome and it involved too many steps.
3 out of the 5 really enjoyed how the websites felt like familiar places such as Expedia or
like if they were in at actual travel agency.
Positive experiences
Inviting colors, high quality pictures, everyone was smiling on the website.
They also shared fast check outs except for one participant.
Negative experiences
All of the participants shared a disappointment regarding travel agencies. This is a little hard to address because most of these are few and far between and quality really is not a big factor for them since the businesses are aware people go online to book flights more often than not.
One participant did not trust the mobile app or web for purchases as well as cumbersome check out. I would think a better solution for this problem would be for the retailer to devise a streamline check out process without so many steps in order to finalize purchases easier especially for older customers.
2. Information Architecture
To ensure I have a proper information architecture for the design, I used the Affinity Map below to help me in organizing the IA of the site.
Lo Fi Wireframes
The following wireframes illustrate desktop landing page, product page, and checkout page.
Mobile, Tablet, and Desktop first iteration.
Mobile, Tablet and Desktop second iteration.
Responsive Designs
Here we can see the finalized UI kit implemented into the responsive design.
