Roles: Researcher | UI Designer | Information Architect | Pair Designer
Team: chelseajohnston.design | patrickjkeating.com
Scope: 2 Week | Team Project | February 2019
Tools: Trello | Whimsical | Sketch | Invision
Our Task
Spirit Airlines is the cheapest of all airfare deals, but when it comes to customer service, the carrier comes dead last. A lot of the negative attention the carrier has is due to their poor customer service, late flights, and lost bags. Spirit Airlines profitability is based upon a low expenditure - cutting every corner that allows them to save money- and that includes their customer service investment. In order to be a sustainable competitor, Spirit Airlines needs a way to improve their overall customer experience - without investing in costly support representatives. Leveraging their existing mobile app, Spirit Airlines wants to find a way to provide customers with reliable support in order to gain the trust of customers and turn around its tarnished reputation.
Customer reviews
Gathering thoughts and initial data
We each grabbed gathered quantitative data to share with the group. I took a look at their competitors, what they were doing right, what they were missing, and how Spirit can improve.
What we assumed diving into this was that they:
were bad at customer service
had poor transparency
lost all of the baggage
an over all feeling of neglect
Discovering the problem & Research
We took to their app to see what everyone was talking about. There were a lot of frustrations through out this process. The process leads you off the app. What was not intuitive is that if you wanted to submit feedback then you needed to scroll to the bottom. What was confusing was that feedback button on the left side. It leads to nowhere. Here are the main pain points we encountered.
Not an intuitive navigation.
Taken off the app to submit a request.
Mislabeled/confusing copywriting and pop-ups.
Small input fields.
Creating an assumptions Journey map gave us a perspective to look through while we waited for our surveys and interviews to wrap up. One main complaint we assumed was that Spirit lost all of the baggage and that people traveling would like to have an RFID tracker on their luggage.
Through our research, we discovered that luggage was a much smaller issue than the way customer service interacted with their customer base.
We used different outlets to gather information from potential users. Some teammates used social media, google docs, and in-person interviews. I reached out to the Reddit community. We had resulted from 88 respondents to sift through. We found that when you mention “Spirit Airlines” everyone has a story. Spoiler alert it is not always positive. A resounding feeling of “ugh” is associated with the airline. In synthesizing the data that we collected, we found that:
Transparency
Good customer service
Flight updates
Cleaner UI
were what people wanted from Spirit Airlines. With our time constraint we focused on; transparency, customer service, and create a more intuitive mobile app.
Developing Personas
With the research that we gathered. I developed two personas that were a good fit for problems and potential user flows.
Karen: Has already purchased a flight to visit her grandmother, but her grandmother tragically passed away before her trip. Karen is having a hard time cancelling her flight. She goes to the app to submit feedback.
Jim: Has an annual budget meeting with a client in Chicago. Since he travels often, he needs an intuitive way to book flights. Jim lives in Los Angelas so he jumps on the Spirit App to purchase his flights.
“ Family, to me, is everything.
Karen B.
"Without a doubt, all of my success is linked to how I care for the people in my life.
Jim T.
Wireframes & Prototyping
After we gathered a good amount of data, we sat down and did a design studio.
From there we created low fidelity wireframes. We then did usability testing with our wireframes. After a few tweaks we set to work creating high fidelity wireframes and prototypes
Our goal was to clean up what Spirit already had, and improve the UI for higher usability.
Collecting our thoughts for phase two:
We briefly touched on doing a brand refresh, with the time allotted this got pushed to part of phase two. I brought back their previous slogan “Home of the bare fare” and playing on the word bare, we landed on a bear cub to be Spirit’s new mascot. We found through research, that having a mascot will make your company more attractive and credible to potential customers. Mascots can help you to build a loyal brand following. A study out of Hiroshima University of Japan have done a study about the positive affects of mascots.
“... viewing cute things improves subsequent performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness, possibly by narrowing the breadth of attentional focus,”
- Hiroshima University of Japan Study (2012)