The Opportunity

Flight Centre is Australia’s largest travel agency, and relatively new to the app scene. Flight Club, an existing weekly promotion from the website, was repositioned as exclusive to the new Flight Centre app users. From the booking experience, the viewing of and filtering products and the type of products offered, the App team took Flight Club and gave it a new lease on life.

My role was to design the user experience and a user interface that was intuitive, as native-as-possible, as well as fit with Flight Centre’s existing branding.

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 The Approach

Break it to build it better

The first phase of the project was the grunt work. While the Business Analysist and Product Owner audited and documented the current Flight Club process, I was tasked with auditing and documenting the experience for a customer and performing competitive analysis. I compared and contrasted Flight Club‘s current offering against similar promotions run by airlines and daily-deal type websites and apps. The competitive analysis revealed key features that were essential to meet a benchmark minimum viable product (MVP).

Designing solutions

Wireframes were an important process for designing Flight Club. They were particularly useful to communicate how different deals are purchased through the app. For example, flights can be booked directly through the app, however, all other travel products could only be purchased through a consultant (via phone or email).  This lead to designing and defining which flows would be a native app and which parts would be – due to resources-  an in-app browser experience, and what that would look and like for the user.

Other concepts explored during the initial wireframing phase were more complex notifications, cross promotional opportunities and what a 100% in-app experience would be.

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The Outcome

Refreshed, Native UI

To keep production costs within time frame and budget, the Flight Centre app adhered to the native visual languages and experiences of Material (for Android device users) and  Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (from iOS device users). Flight Club was no exception, so two interfaces were designed , keeping in mind the different ways each native system presented information or responded to an experience.