Ready to Fly: Helping Customers Travel Again
The pandemic turned air travel upside down. For customers who found flying stressful even in normal times, the rules had suddenly changed. How do you tell people everything they need to know, so they feel ready to fly again?
My role: Design leadership, experience strategy, initiative sponsor
Outcome: The Ready to Fly page, taken from concept to production by July 2020. This page served as the foundation for all Pandemic-related travel prep for travelers.
The Problem
The pandemic upended United Airlines and the entire airline industry. Many of our customers already saw flying as complicated and anxiety-inducing, and now the rules were changing constantly and new information was developing by the hour. Was traveling safe? Did people need to wear masks? How clean were the planes?
I realized we needed a better way to tell customers everything they needed to know when they were ready to travel again. No one had asked for this project I took the initiative and challenged my team to develop solutions we could share with the broader organization and get buy-in to build.
The Approach
Before any ideation, I had our research team launch a remote study to understand how customers felt about air travel at that moment. With the research in hand, the team ran ideation workshops on a shared InVision Freehand board to capture ideas and give feedback. This was early in the shift to remote work, so part of my goal was to test how well we could lead ideation virtually.
The Ready to Fly page grew out of those sessions: one place for customers to find everything they needed before they traveled.
The Impact
The first version of the Ready to Fly page went live in July 2000. This page served as the foundation for all Covid-related travel updates and later evolved to the United Travel Ready Center section which is still live today. Once launched, customers had a single-source of truth and the broader organization had a single place where they could share updates and changes as they developed. It gave everyone a little piece of mind during a truly chaotic time.
