Bringing data to Life
United MileagePlus is the frequent flyer program for United Airlines, a member of Star Alliance. United Airlines operates out of 7 hubs and serves countries around the world. The airline’s MileagePlus program encompasses a wide array of destinations, rewards, miles availability, and a variety of ways to earn and redeem miles. Also, there are four levels of elite status you can attain to earn more miles per dollar spent on United flights to get various perks when you fly. These perks, available at different levels of status, include free checked bags, same-day flight changes with no fee and flight upgrades. How can we translate this level of complexity and information into something that is a valuable experience?
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Making things simple
Our focus was to understand the context, journey, and nature of the passengers and its many different requirements, both from the company and users and create an experience centered on their immediate needs. The client’s original idea was to cut costs and improve the digital experience, but once we started to look at all the data and information, taking a look at previous feedback and incorporating behavioral patterns, we realized that the task was more challenging than a “visual redesign”. It needed to be a great experience that creates value. This approach ultimately changed user perspective by resolving a complicated task in a simple way, plus benefit the business.
Better Business: Better Experience
It was more than just a visual and experiential task. We wanted to have a wider impact, give users something great that they can use, enjoy and also feel rewarded and heard by the airline. I wanted to build an experience that generates better business opportunities and trackable revenue.
Growing the business through smart design
Localized sites depending on the market the user is accusing the website with an extensive collection of top international and local brands from exclusive partners. Users could enjoy the benefits of an extensive network of partners according to what they like, from a quiet dinner to a vacation cruise, car rentals, even paying a mortgage or getting insurance for your home, worldwide in nearly 340 destinations in over 50 countries.
A unique experience
Working together with a team of developers, business analysts and operational teams across the globe, each user enjoyed a unique layout with a specific set of business rules, messages, notifications and unique partner opportunities.
From the location, time of the day earned miles or consumer preferences, we created a modular layout that adjusted and updated the information in real-time.
We created a brand style guide specifically for this project, with icons, message styles, alerts, micro-websites and written voice to support development teams and partners to create a seamless experience across all platforms and markets across the globe.
Consistency is key to brand development
In order to create a seamless experience for users, we need a quick reference style guide to help developers, teams and stakeholders the basic design principles and visual styles to work on the countless systems involved in this project, besides keeping the experience in check, also improved efficiency, collaboration and delivery of assets needed to create this amazing project.
