Planning the Trip

United Airlines had piloted Phase 1 of their Insight Mobile App, which at the time, was a standalone iPhone 10 app designed for Above the Wing (ATW) Supervisors to manage United operations and their flight or zone by reviewing critical information related to flights. The design team was asked to build upon this App for Phase 2, which would also roll out to Leads, Customer Service Representatives, and Below the Wing (BTW) Supervisors. The goal for this phase was to enhance design elements and features introduced in Insight Phase 1, and to develop an intuitive user experience solution for mobility viewing on iPhone 6+ devices.

Flight UAPhase1

Below are mockups from Phase 1 of the Insight App.

All Aboard Flight UAPhase2

United Airlines provided everyone on project team a Requirements Doc that would include the scope and requirements of Phase 2 of the project.  It also included that past Phase 1 requirements.  

Prepare for Takeoff

I designed the wireframes for Phase 2 in a prototyping tool called Justinmind.  I’d always deliver my wireframes/mockups to the stakeholders in a deck that was broken down into mini user-flows with touch points so that it was easy to understand and digest. These mid-fidelity wires reflected all the elements in scope that were included in the requirements doc.

In the Air

We had several check-ins with the stakeholders throughout the project and sometimes there would be changes to some of the requirements. The wireframes were frequently updated. Here are examples of how sometimes feedback was documented, and also a snippet of the updates and change log.

This deck shows the updates to the initial wireframes I made a month prior.

Flight Observations

The UX researcher and I would work together to figure out a test plan. We would decide on the tasks, flows, and scenarios. I built a prototype using Flinto. We had plans to conduct two rounds of low-fidelity (wireframes) designs, and three rounds of high-fidelity (visual design included) designs in a few airports all over the country.

We began testing and conducted one round of low-fidelity testing and one round of high-fidelity testing in IAH (Houston International Airport)

Prepare for Landing

We gathered some findings from our first rounds of testing and started making updates to the designs so that those could be tested for the next round. Here is a user-flow to the updated designs, and below are some of the screens.

Landing with Connected Flight Delayed

With the first two rounds of testing completed, we could not go forward with the remaining three rounds because the project was put on hold due to budget constraints. By the time it was about to pick back up, I was transferred to another project that required me to be in other states, mainly the Houston airport and office.

Turbulence Encountered During the Flight

One of the biggest challenges I encountered was organizing the information architecture for the screens to select your stations and zones. I had to do an audit of each and every airport that United Airlines services and also how they were laid out, and decide how to split up and organize those stations and zone for the selection screens.

Another challenge was when we had our first round of testing coming up on a Monday. It was the Friday before and I had several updates to make (as I mentioned, iterations were quite frequent due to feedback and changes of requirements) to designs and thus, the prototype, as well. However, United Airlines service requests took months sometimes, and I was still using a Trial Version of Flinto. It had just expired, and, well, a couple workarounds had to be made. I worked all weekend to get the prototype completed before the test on Monday.