Virgin Atlantic - Exploring Dual Carrier Search Results
Virgin and Delta are partners, if you search for a flight to specific destinations, you might be flying with Delta, but you won’t know until you are boarded and sitting.
As a team, we wanted to understand and improve VA customers content awareness and trust at the booking decision level. For this research project, I worked in close collaboration with the Product Owner and the Content Editor and the Product Designer and presented the findings to the broader Digital team.
Understand.
The issue was threefold, VA customers who didn’t notice the carrier change found themselves unexpectedly boarding a non-VA flight. Customers who saw the shift in a carrier would leave, call VA to book or go elsewhere. Customers expected the same service, while others were surprised later in the journey. It hurt the brand, customer trust and experience.
At this stage of hypotheses from SEO and Customer Agents anecdotal comments, we were looking to observe people’s reaction to their search results and understand their perception. Would they notice the different carrier, what are their service expectations if the airline is other than VA and what else would help them make an informed decision when booking a flight?
In doing, we wanted to benchmark the current user experience give an upfront message to avoid misunderstandings and future-proof oncoming partnering flights with AirFrance and KLM.
Create.
I led the User Research, designed the Research Plan, Discussion Guide and conducted a cognitive walkthrough usability study as a benchmark. To do this, I used a task-based scenario asking the participants to book a particular flight that will display different carriers in search results and the flight summary. The test closed with satisfaction Likert scale to understand user satisfaction and a debrief discussion of gage their expectations.
During the sessions, the UX Designer was collaborating to gather stakeholder insights, impressions and questions to the user. After the sessions, we debriefed for positive, negative comments and ideas.
Finally, I gathered the data from the video recording and hand-written notes and the stakeholder sessions and analysed these in an affinity diagram workshop engaging the team to collate findings.
Deliver.-
I confirmed the team’s initial assumptions accompanied with usability problems, user quotes and videos which set a benchmark of the current state. I presented four themes of findings on Terminology, Trust, Carrier Responsibility and Loyalty membership for improvement. I then coupled these with satisfaction ratings, side feedback and a set of content and design actionable outcomes to give a clear direction.
In addition to that, I promoted the role of User Research in the Digital team in a more creative and immersive way. I created a Mini-museum to accompany my report, so that team members and stakeholders from other departments can look the UX Research process in their own time.
Outcome: The project gained attention beyond my team, reaching Delta’s User Research team and stakeholders the In-flight Customer Experience team.