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OVERVIEW
AMERICAN AIRLINES is a leading air travel company that operates globally, connecting people and destinations with a vast network of flights and services. With a strong focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences, American Airlines plays a pivotal role in the aviation industry. In my role at American Airlines, I contributed to enhancing operational efficiency and customer service by working on various projects to improve different aspects of the airline's loyalty operations and internal design system. One notable project involved optimizing parts of the internal agent system, named Ventana, to maximize utilization and minimize disruptions, resulting in improved performance and overall agent and customer satisfaction.
DISCLAIMER: The visuals and content have undergone modifications. This project was deprioritized due to confidential program changes
in progress. The presented contents serve as a showcase of my design thinking practice and applied methodologies.
PROJECT ANALYSIS
PROBLEMS: The current version of Ventana: Choice Rewards presents challenges for users due to
the overwhelming amount of information and the complexity of its functionality. Agents often struggle to navigate through the platform, locate relevant information, and perform tasks efficiently due to the UI and content being out of date. This not only hampers productivity but also leads to frustration and a steep learning curve for new users. Our primary objective for the Ventana: Choice Rewards redesign was to simplify the user experience by streamlining the platform's functionality and presenting information in a more organized and digestible manner.
DESIGN SOLUTION: By conducting thorough user research, including interviews and usability testing, I unveiled a critical insight: participants often escalated calls when receiving calls regarding Choice Rewards simply because the platform was difficult to use and the information was too copious to sort through in efficient timing. Typically an agent call should last between 1-5 minutes. However, due to the handicaps of Ventana, calls would take 10-15 minutes, leaving customers feeling frustrated and agents feeling dubious about their performance abilities. Taking heed to the pain points and
goals of our users, we successfully eliminated information overload and confusion in the new UI,
by simplifying task flows, making task keys more obvious without having to have significant training, adding toast notifications when tasks are complete, and creating an archive for information that is no longer relevant to the fiscal year.
TARGET USERS:
• Agents
• Escalation Agents
• Admin
DELIVERABLES: User Interviews + Research, Affinity Maps, User flows, Emotion Map, Personas, High-Fidelity Prototype + Wireframes
TOOLS: FIGMA, FIGJAM, AI, PS
DURATION: 3 MONTHS
ROLE: LEAD DESIGNER, UX RESEARCHER
TAGS: #UX #UI #WEB #SAAS
EMPATHY MAPPING
Following a series of moderated interviews, I crafted a comprehensive emotion map to distill the participants' nuanced emotional responses and sentiments. This emotion map acts as a navigational guide that sheds light on prevalent themes and significant issues that necessitate resolution.
+ Think-out-loud Discovery Interviews
AFFINITY CLUSTERING
Next, I extracted and organized the cards from the emotion map into affinity clusters. After carefully reviewing each card's emotional context and identifying recurring patterns, themes, and connections, we were able to identify high-priority pain-points and secondary challenges. As a result, we were able to scale the significance of how these emotions influenced agent decisions, thereby shaping the direction of our design approach.
EMOTION MAP
As an alternative to creating a full journey map, due to time constraints, I made an emotion map to amplify the voices of our agents and showcase the level of frustration they felt when using the Ventana application. While a journey map would have provided more comprehensive insights into the user experience, the emotion map enabled me to highlight the key moments of frustration that were negatively impacting our agents.
This was an important step in the design process, as it revealed the need to bring more joy into the agent experience when working within the platform. By mapping the highs and lows of emotions tied to specific interactions, I aimed to make the case for prioritizing improvements that would remove pain points and introduce more delight. Though not a replacement for a complete journey mapping exercise, the emotion map provided actionable and impactful insights into agents' feelings that could inform the redesign. Keeping the goal of enhancing the agent experience front and center, I utilized this alternative approach due to time limitations but was still able to uncover key opportunities to improve the platform for our users.
PERSONAS + USER FLOWS
As this project was the first internal project assigned to the Loyalty team, I created two user persona profiles that detail the inspirations, goals, and pain-points of our agents and administration to serve
as a common reference point for the entire team, including designers, developers, marketers, and
stakeholders. They help keep everyone aligned on the goals and needs of the target audience.
These personas aided in envisioning scenarios and use cases that our product will encounter
once developed. Using this information, I designed workflows for each persona and potential
user type to define the functionality of the interface.
