Jet: Customer management
I redesigned the homepage of an internal tool in response to internal SME feedback and UX research.
My role: UX designer, strategist, UX research, stakeholder management
An agent’s view of their working screen with multiple, busy tools.
Old tools background
Jet is the tool that lobby agents use to check customers in and gate agents use to board the plane. Before Jet, the agents used a lot of older tools. The older tools are still in production but are slowly being phased out as Jet is going online.
Aero, the main tool lobby agents used before Jet, always received feedback that it was extremely cluttered, hard to read, and wasn’t easy to learn. Jet seeks to make the functionality more simple and less complex.
A company-wide goal is to increase NPS, a metric to gauge a customer’s experience with a company. When agents have a negative experience with tools, that could increase the likelihood of a customer having a negative experience. We wanted to make sure these tools were enhancing and simplifying the agent’s experiences, not making them harder or more complex.
Current state Jet
Jet’s customer management functionality was already in the field for a few months and the product team was asked to make enhancements based on feedback from the field and discovery research.
The customer hub had 3 main actions, Manage Bags, Special Service Requests, and Seats. The boarding pass print option, among other actions, was buried under 2-3 taps on the mobile experience, which was too many for the repetitive use of that function by agents.
Post-launch state Jet Customer Hub - mobile.
Post-launch state Jet Customer Hub - desktop.
Informing our decisions through data
Qual:
We heard through a feedback form in the app and the first round of post-launch validation testing that the agents were having a hard time using the customer hub to do simple actions on mobile. Some wanted the “print boarding pass” action easily accessible in the mobile customer hub experience, some wanted the same hierarchy as the desktop experience.
Metrics:
Increase lobby agent satisfaction with the mobile Jet customer actions.
Measured by validation testing qualitative feedback.
Decrease mobile taps to interact with the most important customer actions.
Measured by the # of taps, we were unable to measure by competition time.
Quant:
The top 3 actions used on the homepage (aside from “Complete party check-in”) were Manage SSRs, Manage Seats, and Manage Bags. The 4th most used was the Boarding pass printing action, not “View more travel options” as we might’ve thought.
Sketching and designing
I sketched a few ideas for the customer cards and actions. On desktop, the hierarchy was not the same as on mobile, so I thought it would be helpful to create the same hierarchy on mobile. I sketched out different ideas for new customer cards and customer actions based on previous research about the agent’s workflow.
I thought a full card layout would be the best bet for information to be consumed, plus it gave us real estate for any additional icons or information the product team might want to add in the future.
I created 3 different prototypes to simulate the new customer card and customer actions experience (seen below). One utilized the iOS action sheet; the second had a full-page customer action card with links; the third had a swipe action to reveal buttons and an action sheet with more options.
A page of my sketch book, showing the designs for a new customer card.
Prototype designs
This prototype utilized the native iOS action sheet.
This prototype had a full-page customer action card with links to different areas of the app.
This prototype had a swipe action to reveal buttons and an action sheet with even more action options.
Research goals & research findings
I partnered with my UX researcher to test with 18 agents at Newark’s EWR Airport, Los Angeles’ LAX, and Pittsburgh’s PIT Airport in both a remote and in-person testing environment. We asked a few demographic questions and then went into a usability test for all three flows.
Our goals were to understand:
Which option do the agents like best? (desirability)
Which option is the most usability? (usability)
Is there anything else we need to change? (blindspots)
We found:
The agents preferred the three action buttons on the home screen in the current vs any of the action sheets or slide function, so all three of the options weren’t as desirable to the agents.
The second option was the most usable and familiar to the agents we tested with. They like that there was no swiping and the action sheet felt like an unwanted surprise when they just wanted to get to the next action.
The agents suggested we add the print boarding pass option as a fourth button on the hub page.
The key for the agents was that they didn’t want to “go too far from the customer hub page.” If they did so, they felt like they would have too many taps to get back to the hub page.
Final (ideal) designs
Finding the balance between having enough content on the customer hub page and not too much to make it cluttered was the biggest challenge we faced when finalizing these designs.
With influence from the second option and the agent’s suggestions, I created the below design interaction. It married the agent’s need to print the boarding pass on the customer hub but didn’t create too much visual clutter.
The team’s feasible win
Though I designed the ideal state, the first step we took from a feasibility standpoint was the below design. As I discussed the design and research with our product and development teams, it became more clear that the team was not ready to completely overhaul the homepage from a hierarchical perspective. We compromised and kept most of the hub the same; only adding the “Print BP” button to the page.
Our most current quantitative data shows that agents use the Print BP button on the hub shows that the agents use the “Print BP” button 12% more than they did previously and the new design diminished their completion by 2 taps. I found through our validation testing with 8 agents at ORD and PHL that this update has improved the agent’s experience and in turn, the United customer experience.
