Year
2020
Project
Volo Airline App
Role
UI Designer
UX Writer
Volo is an Airline App* for domestic flights inside the US.
* Fictitious airline companies’ conditions apply.
Volo Airline App
Scenario
A traveller is at an airport, waiting for the last leg of a flight home when their flight gets abruptly cancelled due to bad weather.
Challenge
Write a message from the airline app, notifying them of the cancellation and what they need to do next.
Design the screens where this message will be accessed and read.
The airline has the responsability to provide the information and the solutions the customer needs, in order to allow them to make informed decisions.
Volo Airline App
User Context
Who is the user?
Domestic flights in the US are a much easier way to travel across the country than by road, due to its dimension.
When a disruption happens on a flight leg, the customer could be a thousand miles away from home, what creates a stressful situation.
Volo Airline App
Problems to solve
Focusing on the domestic flight travellers, the app challenge was trying to solve 3 problems:
Reassure the Customer
The airline should inform the customer without causing them any distress.
Offer Options to solve the problem
List the options and offer support so the customer can make their own decisions.
Be Human and offer Support
The airline should seek to provide human contact, so it can be more helpful and create a relationship with the customer.
Volo Airline App
UX Approach
01 Color
The logo and interface were designed using soothing natural tones in dark and light schemes- designed inspired on the sky and the greenery the customers can see from the sky.
The alarm colour code uses sunset colours, something also common for travellers. It is different enough from the main palette to alert for changes, but not too red-ish to provoke restlessness.
02 Front and Center
The message is displayed on the screen centre, so it doesn't go unnoticed, with a contrasting background for better legibility.
03 Personalize the contact
When open, the communication tone in the message is empathetic, clear and informational and offers support. The interface offers straightforward options to enraged clients - that even hurts the company interests - but, on a secondary level, offers more reasonable options to actually solve the problem.
This has a psychological effect on the customer, that aims at diluting anger progressively.
Volo Airline App
Ideation & Testing
This was an exercise in UX Writing and Interface design, so it was never meant to be tested.
Anyhow, if it was to be tested, some of the methods I would use to test both the messaging and the app usability to this specific key take would be:
- Immersion test – based on storytelling techniques to set the mood for the user to feel they belong to the scenario would provide an immersion environment where relaxed and in-the-zone the user could react instinctively to the situation and the messaging. This could be complemented with video footage of the test.
- Impression test – to check for gut reactions to the scenario and how the prototype would provide a solution to the question at hand.
- User surveys – after being subject to these two methods, and considering the objective is to understand how to give bad upsetting news to regular customers, I think Volo would take some key learnings from these methods.
- Other methods could be applied, but my proposal is to check reactions to the way we can message better.
Volo Airline App
Conclusions
This challenge was a good example of how much importance UX Writing has, especially in fields where the customer is heavily impacted.
An interesting challenge, following this one, is to design and map the whole app, especially on what UX Writing concerns.