Spirit Airlines Mobile App

UX Designer for Coforge
May 2018 - Feb 2019

Project Overview

Our client, Spirit Airlines is an ultra-low-cost airline carrier based out of Florida, who mainly operate in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. They asked Coforge to build an end-to-end native iOS app for their flyers, to book and manage their trips. Prior to this, passenger check-in was handled mainly through airport kiosks and agents.

During initial discovery with the stakeholders, we found out that their two main personas were middle aged couples who vacationed with kids; and college students and early professionals who love to find a good deal for personal travel.

Project goals

• Increase revenue through mobile booking by providing a fully native booking UX
• Promote self service and reduce agent handling through mobile check-in

Problem space

Our client has an unbundled fare model where they treat seats, bags, and extras as ancillaries, and exclude them from the base fare. We learnt through customer feedback that flyers negatively perceive these to be "hidden fares" that they discover about later in their journey. During our scoping activity, we conducted a heuristic evaluation of their website, and discovered that the many frustrations of users in their web experience also arose from long, inefficient flows.

One of the challenges was designing for dozens of use cases. We had to map flows for guest users and signed in users of their three different member tiers for one-way, round trip, and multi-city flight search. And since they have an unbundled fare model, there were additional steps (seats, bags, extras) to the booking path. While conducting a competitive analysis, we discovered that it is unusual in the airline industry to have a fully native booking experience, especially for multi-city flights.

Use Cases

Since we had to plan for a lot of use cases, we designed with two main considerations:
1. Optimizing design by focusing on 3 passengers buying 2 products each (which covers 85% of their use cases), while;
2. Accommodating most scenarios, including edge cases, by designing for the most complex scenario (which is multi city flight with multiple layovers)

To meet with the goals, we decided to include book, check-in, trips, and flight status in our roadmap. We wanted to deliver an experience that was transparent, quick, and efficient. We aimed to clean up a lot of their flows, and to add accelerators to speed up user tasks. We also aimed to provide enough information for transparency, while maintaining a clean and uncluttered aesthetic. Visually, we went with a modular card-based design to maintain consistency and elegance.

Ideation & Design

In an extreme case like this, purchasing four products (flight, seats, bags, extras) for each passenger, and for each leg of each flight would add a lot of steps and make the booking flow long. So, through testing and iteration, we gave users flexibility to skip ancillary purchases for a flight, or for the overall trip.

2. Typically the industry shows flight status by leg, and not by trip; due to the complexity of several statuses associated with each flight at each airport. We designed a solution to provide an overview of the flight status of a trip, which is not common in the industry.

Flight status

Most flyers come to a smartphone device for check-in. This is why check-in was one of the main flows on our main menu, alongside book, trips (trip details), and flight status. We wanted to expedite the check-in process. For check in, we eliminated lengthy forms and incorporated the ability to check-in for a subset of passengers on your trip.

Check-in

The biggest challenge is designing a cart that allows you to modify your order in-cart for each passenger, for each product, and for each leg of the flight. Our goal is to avoid information overload. Each card would represent a product purchase, and two cards for upsell. The product cards would expand to show purchases for every passenger, and editing the selection would pull up a bottom sheet that resembled the original screen, ensuring consistency. We are currently exploring ideas for cart with following main comparisons
‍1. Multi Step Cart vs Single Step Cart
2. Breakdown View (Per flight or Per passenger) vs Trip View

‍We are also exploring the idea of an express check-out cart, and how it would affect sales of ancillaries through A/B testing.

Cart