Steven Jones
User Experience Specialist

Emirates Airlines

Skywards, the loyalty programme for Emirates Airlines, has been an industry leader for a number of years, however, the digital experience has not matured inline with the programmes success. The ambition was to maintain user retention and increase group revenue contributions, while moving away from standalone mobile and desktop sites, to a responsive solution. Emirates were in need of feasible strategic direction, while ensuring results could be reported to senior management.

Wireframes created for the Family Groups proposition to gain key stakeholder feedback

Approach

Consulting to the Digital Product Manager of Skywards and engaging with 5 departments within the loyalty programme, my responsibilities were split between integrating new feature requests into the existing platform, while more importantly, advising on the future direction to improve the user experience by re-designing key flows, while taking into account the immense technical challenges. There were two focus areas where I invested most time and energy to prevail significant value to Emirates stakeholders.

Bringing department managers together to ideate and share business knowledge.

Department Collaboration

Firstly, improving internal collaboration through inclusive design, ensuring key department figures were involved early in the design process. During discovery phases, workshops and stakeholder interviews would be held to enable goal sharing amongst teams, while appreciating their colleagues ambitions too, allowing for greater trust while prioritising roadmap items.

Furthermore, I brought together the SCRUM team of Business Analysts, Designers and Developers for the first time, to increase transparency of upcoming project and ensure subject matter experts were in the room to tackle these complex problems.

User Research

The second focus was gaining insight from customers, starting with quantitative research through data analysis, surveys, card sorting, click testing and click tracking to learn about our audience, followed by inviting participants to User Interviews, to dig a little deeper to understand the what major frustrations.

Quick fire reports would be presented to decision making stakeholders to advise on major problems observed that require immediate attention, while providing strategic direction for redesigns that should be prioritised.

Facilitating a User interview in the Research Lab, to validate customer pain points, while stakeholders observe remotely.

Outcomes

In 18 months of hard graft, we were able to celebrate the launch a brand new proposition, 3 experiences redesigned totalling 37 pages and 8 feature enhancements launched to the existing platform. Alongside the delivery achievements, the most satisfying part was with the trust and impact I had creating product and research strategies for my major stakeholder, that will to be ingrained into future Emirates products while they ambitiously update their legacy platforms.

Here are a hand-picked selection of projects completed:

Facilitating the Landscape assement workshop, sharing known customer pain points.

The business and user discovery plan activites that would drive the redesign product strategy.

Skywards Redesign Discovery Phase

Family Groups

A new proposition was to be launched allowing members to share air miles between family members. Collaborating with the project stakeholders, we were able to interview users to discover their needs and reduce launch scope to ensure we provided value to members and the business quickly.

The Family Groups Dashboard launched UI Design

The Spend Miles final UI Design, example showcasing bidding on Gunners tickets.

Earn & Spend Miles Redesign

To increase member retention, we redesigned the Spend Miles Partners Section to allow members to transact their miles easier or simply browse for future incentives to earn more miles.

He brilliantly managed client expectations for Emirates and also the UI designer in his team. He successfully thrived in a challenging client environment and onboard UI designers and PM in his team who changed repeatedly during his time. He is an asset as an individual contributor and definitely a great UX Manager in the making.

Aditi Kant - Lead UX, Tigerspike