British Airways
Category
Web / Mobile / App Design
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At the heart of the BA brand is the promise ‘To fly, to serve’. We worked with the BA team to translate 100 years of service to the digital world – transforming the brand’s digital experience across the board, adding value to every customer's journey and ultimately giving people a reason to fly BA.
Introduction and role
As Britain’s flag carrier airline was nearing its 100th anniversary, it had a desire to look ahead to the next hundred years.
British Airways reached out to DesignStudio with the challenge to stand out in a crowded and competitive market – with new carriers disrupting the industry and long-time providers competing for space.
At the heart of the BA brand is the promise ‘To fly, to serve’. We worked with the BA team to translate 100 years of service to the digital world – transforming the brand’s digital experience across the board, adding value to every customer's journey and ultimately giving people a reason to fly BA.
My role was Product Design Director and involved end-to-end UX and UI design and team leadership. The development was done by BA's in-house team and handed over via regular visits to their Charing Cross office.
A vision for digital
We collaborated with BA to co-create a digital vision to take them into the future. Underpinned by five principles universal to any experience, the vision connects teams and activity across the business, and inspires a better experience for BA’s customers.
The world of flight
The execution of this vision took the form of a rigorous digital toolkit that informed the redesign of key elements across BA’s digital ecosystem.
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.
Service reimagined
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.
With the vision and toolkit in place, we embarked on a multi-year journey with BA to realise the vision across the most important journeys for their millions of customers.
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; changing the Manage my Booking process to create a calmer, more elegant, more BA way to access and control your journey.
Testimonial
"The work with the design team has been one of the cornerstones of our digital strategy and customer experience transformation. Their ability to bring world class design skills and methods, together with their highly collaborative approach, has brought the best out of us as a business. It has delivered a phenomenal set of outcomes, including double digit improvement in KPIs in digital channels." - Jack Smith, Director of Digital, British Airways.
