Translating 100 years of service into a digital future.
Building a design pipeline from the ground-up and delivering a first-class user experience to bring double-digit improvement in digital-channel KPIs.
British Airways
Agency: DesignStudio
My Role: Product Design Director
The Team: 3x internal Designers, Product Managers, Strategist, Full-stack Engineers and 50+ client-side Designers.
Who are British Airways?
Founded in 1919, British Airways are one of the world’s best-known and most loved airlines. Known for their in-flight service and passenger experience, they transport 50 million passengers a year around the globe.
As they marked their 100th anniversary, British Airways looked to DesignStudio to help build a design pipeline and redefine digital experience in a crowded marketplace, adding value to every passenger experience and giving people a reason to fly BA.
The Challenge
Looking to the next 100 years, British Airways wanted to begin by refreshing it’s end-to-end digital experience across discovery, booking, pre-flight and post-flight. In a market saturated with cookie-cutter booking experiences, little inspiration and frustrating up-sells, BA saw an opportunity to augment their famous in-flight service by rolling-out a beautiful, functional digital journey.
To enable this, we worked closely with BA’s in-house product teams to implement a new design pipeline from the ground-up.
The Objectives
Starting with assessing their internal processes, we set out to review the entire digital passenger journey, identify pain-points and opportunities to enhance the product wherever possible.
• Develop internal processes to enable future delivery and maintenance of design.
• Identify areas to inject joy to the discovery journey
• Build a design system and UI framework alongside a redesigned product experience.
Research
To get into the heritage of the British Airways brand and appreciate the customer journey, we got fully immersed in the existing experience. Visiting the BA archives, museum and offices at Heathrow Airport we were given unprecedented access behind the scenes. We took a flight and started plotting the beginnings of the new experience.
Working at both the DesignStudio offices and the Chancery Lane home of BA’s growing digital team, we started exploring the many ways we could create meaningful experiences across every Customer’s journey.
Outcomes
Through analysing the existing experience and taking forward our learnings from research, we defined five principles that would underpin the new designs.
• Explore a new perspective - Show places like they’ve never been seen.
• Get loud, get quiet - Know when to scale up and down the experience.
• Reward curiosity - Create moments of surprise.
• Join up the journey - Always see the experience end-to-end.
• Make it last - The excitement doesn’t end when the wheels touch down.
Competitor Analysis
The typical airline booking experience is seldom anything different or new. Even outside of air-travel, ticket booking is almost a standardised process with seemingly little in the way of divergence. We didn’t want to break a familiar format. However, to define where we could bring some of the delight associated with British Airway’s service, we looked not only at other booking platforms, but the overall experience offered by other airlines.
Design Phase: Journey mapping, testing and digital toolkit
The execution of this vision started with a rigorous digital toolkit that informed the redesign of key elements across BA’s digital ecosystem.
This project also marked a transition into an ongoing user centred testing process that continues to drive improvements to both the design system and any implemented experience which carries on today.
At the heart of the toolkit was a new design language "The World of Flight" - a flexible design system with a distinct approach to interaction, motion and navigation inspired by effortless journeys through the sky. We looked to create a design language that brought together the lightness of flight with the precision and refinement of BA's aviation heritage
UI Design
The first step was to overhaul ba.com, working through millions of pages to radically simplify the information architecture. We took inspiration from cabin crew training programmes, and insights from SEO partners and internal teams to ultimately restructure the information architecture around the core needs of BA travellers rather than the business structure.
The content strategy, art direction, experience and structure of core pages were redesigned – from the functional to the inspirational. This resulted in higher value content that customers could find more easily, further amplifying the reasons to fly BA.
Joining the journey
We overhauled the flight buying experience – introducing a new iPad app with the new design language and sales experience; reworking the core sales flow on BA.com; designing a content strategy and new look and feel for ‘travel ready emails’ that took you from purchase to lift off, delivering the right information at the right time; changing the Manage my Booking process creating a calmer, more elegant, more BA way to access and control your flight information.
We also saw the new digital design language bring new life to the experience – from phone screens to checking in at the terminal.
Design System and Component Library
Doubling as a style-guide and documentation for the design toolkit, we used Figma to create a versatile and comprehensive design system. This system contained components for all cross-platform applications and was expanded and evolved throughout the project.
Measuring success
Several elements of the thinking and design, from the re-imagined post booking experience to the design language in T5 are now live and creating memorable and meaningful brand moments that amplify and reflect the BA promise across their customer's journeys, but this is just the beginning.
The digital vision and holistic toolkit has given BA the tools and a newfound confidence to move forward with its digital design. Equipped with this new set of capabilities that the business has been able to continue to utilise in the long term as they look to improve on their digital experience.
“The work with DS has been one of the cornerstones of our digital strategy and customer experience transformation. DS' ability to bring world class design skills and methods, together with their highly collaborative approach that has brought the best out of us as a business and have delivered a phenomenal set of outcomes, including double digital improvement in KPIs in digital channels.”
Jack Smith, Director of Digital - British Airways