Emirates Airlines
Mobile App Design • 2016
Emirates Airlines was seeking assistance rethinking its loyalty program – Skywards Rewards. Considered to be the world’s most luxurious airline, Emirates challenged our team to push beyond the typical airline rewards program and to reimagine what an experience that would live up to the brand promise of “Hello Tomorrow”.
Role: Design Product Designer
Overview
One of the core challenges for the airline industry is the commoditization of travel. Airlines for the most part utilize similar equipment and travel to similar locations. As the industry’s margins have been reduced, service and experience have been the primary differentiator. Similarly, traveler incentive programs have consisted primarily of points programs that focus on transactional exchanges of miles for flights.
Our challenge was to rethink the airline reward program which traditionally has been based on the exchange of miles for flights.
To deliver on the expectations of the reputation of Emirates and deliver on the brand promise of Hello Tomorrow, our service needed to provide value beyond the standard check-in and digital boarding pass used by most airline apps and it needed to get beyond the transactional accrual and exchange of points for flights. The service needed to be equally functional and aspirational.
Targeted Users - Bleisure Traveler
Our research indicated a growing class of travelers known as “bleisure” (business + leisure) that frequently used Emirates. Bleisure travelers often extend business travel over a weekend and often include spouses, significant others or other family members. These findings were confirmed by Emirates and were used as the basis for our feature development.
We chose to focus on two core segments of travel, the upfront inspiration, and research prior to travel and the mobile/in-destination experience - what to do while on the trip. According to our research, the majority of travelers utilize smartphones to research prior to planning travel and also use their devices to discover what to do (food, activities and culture) while on the trip.
The Digital Destination Guide
Inspiration for your next trip and the best guide while there
Our solution focused on a digital destination guide that could inspire travelers on the 150+ areas of international travel serviced by Emirates. Powered by Emirates Customer Genome project - a vast data collection of user profile information, the destination guide matches customer profiles of similar demographic and interest types to make destination and activity suggestions.
During the trip, travelers experience a real-time digital travel assistant that makes location and context-aware suggestions to food, cultural events and popular points of interest. Suggestions are powered through machine learning of historic and current usage patterns and are updated seasonally and real-time to provide up to the minute suggestions. With the travel guide, a user can visit an unfamiliar location, but travel as though they have insider information. The guide is available in offline mode for those wanting to save on international data plans.
Design Process
Sample Wireframes
Below are some of the wireframes used in the process with the team and clients while developing the navigation model and content.
Prototyping
Rapid prototyping was core to the process of developing the navigation flow of the application and it was a crucial tool used to communicate with our client due to global team distribution.
Product Vision Movie Demo
My Role
On this project I developed user stories, product requirements, constructed wireframes and illustrations of the various product features, created high fidelity mockups and generated mobile prototypes to test out the navigation and core user flows. Additionally I assembled the concept video and presentation material used to communicate with key project constituents and stakeholders.