The team
When I joined the team they were experimenting with alternative views for presenting flight options in the booking flow. A lot of great UI design work was going on, but I could see that it was not based on much research and I would need to introduce basic research as a regular practice. I began with a competitor analysis of 12 airlines and found all sites were using variations of nine UI basic patterns. I then made a cut-out paper prototyping kit so users could assemble their ideal booking system using a combination of the established patterns and collaborative sketching.
The Users
With other members of the design team joining me as observers I ran fifteen 45 minute prototyping sessions in the airport terminal which was sufficient to get a clear view on which patterns helped in which use-cases. Having a clear direction from users enabled me to condense the outputs from the airport terminal sessions into a prototype that catered to our market, mainly short-haul low to mid income business and leisure travellers.
This was refined in weekly moderated user-testing sessions until we had settled on an alternate search view and three alternate flight results views. This was used as the basis for the new booking flow ensuring that it would cater for our customers.
Just as importantly, it demonstrated to the design team how easy and valuable it is to include users directly into the design process.
The Change
Throughout my time at Aer Lingus, as well as using tools such as Clicktale and UserZoom, I continued to leverage the unprecedented level of access we had to our users who were sat in the terminal daily with little to do except drink coffee and provide user feedback. By ensuring that we interacted with actual customers at least once every sprint I was able to bring a more user-centric mindset to the design team who were quick to realise the advantage of user validation when advocating for their design decisions.
