Alaska Airlines | Indigo Slate, A Zensar company

Mobile dashboard and UI components on table

work
Alaska Airlines

Alaska Airlines

Putting flight crews first

We created a seamless digital personal assistant that pulled every system flight crews need into one easy-to-use place.

Overview

Flight crews are tasked with more than just face-to-face service with their customers. While flying to a new city every day may sound exciting, it requires tight logistics management, and crews need to constantly consider where to stay upon arrival and how to get around. To maintain safety, they must comply with a mound of FAA regulations. Even requesting time off can be complicated if the system isn’t user friendly—and user friendly is exactly what they didn’t have. Alaska Airlines turned to us to find a way to simplify the process with a single digital personal assistant.

Client name

Alaska Airlines

Discipline

brand, strategy

The Alaska Airlines dashboard screen on mobile devices propped on a tray table

Approach

We interviewed over 100 flight attendants to better understand the pain points of the systems they used and what they needed in a digital personal assistant. Twenty years of legacy interfaces and company systems demanded flight crews use over 10 different platforms each day. Each program had been produced in isolation at different points in time and lacked any semblance of unity. Flight crews had to access each one separately, and the complicated user interfaces had become outdated. At the same time, Alaska Airlines was rolling out their new brand, and this app would be one of the first digital expressions of their new branding.

Solution

Working alongside Alaska Airlines and its engineering teams, we consolidated and streamlined user journeys to provide a frictionless experience. Where flight crews once navigated nearly a dozen complex, antiquated systems, they now tapped their way through a single, user-friendly dashboard that projected their new brand.

Flight attendant walking down the aisle of a plane with a trash bag

Results

Hundreds of flight attendants and pilots now use the platform to manage their logistics and ease their workload. Through continuous user input, the platform continues evolving and maturing to meet their changing needs. Even better, the project established a new design thinking methodology in the company, encouraging Alaska Airlines to be less system-focused and more user-focused, extending the benefits far into the future.