Coronavirus Advisories

Flying with Peace of Mind

Skills
Layout | Typography | Photo Editing | Image Selection | Research | Project Management
Duration
4 weeks
Overview

The travel industry was the first hit by the effects of coronavirus. In late February 2020, Alaska Airlines began seeing the first impacts of the pandemic as bookings decreased and call center volume increased, due to travelers changing and cancelling their upcoming trips. Alaska Airline’s normal marketing approach and suite of alerts was not effective in the face of near-constant pandemic updates, identifying a need for competitor research, quick development of new UX and UI strategies, and a solutions-oriented approach that would bring all resources together to get the job done.

Problem

A first-time waiver and cancellation policy was hastily launched to ensure travelers they could book with confidence and not foot the bill for changes related to the evolving pandemic. With the new policy, call center volume increased precipitously as customers struggled to understand how this would impact their travel plans and risked eroding positive brand impressions.

Goal

Partner with marketing, operations, and legal to understand how new travel policies would affect each travelers’ journey and distill this understanding into paths within the website and mobile experience. With better organization of messaging, travelers were able to understand cleaning procedures should they have to travel and policies around cancelling or changing their tickets if their plans were impacted.

Solution

By reconfiguring the advisory banner as a navigation element we were able to direct travelers to information relevant to their needs, to reassure travelers that their health was our first priority. To do this, I researched competing airlines’ Coronavirus strategy and worked with marketing, copywriters, and developers to design a new page with all pertinent information. On this page we highlighted ever-changing updates, integrated a toggle menu of different scenarios that each traveler would fall under to reduce cognitive overload, and provided links to blog posts outlining what steps Alaska Airlines is taking to ensure traveler safety if their travel is essential.


Homepage

As coronavirus dominated user needs, the homepage required that the normal layout be reconfigured to highlight information relating to the unfolding pandemic, but also allow those who still need to travel the opportunity and knowledge to book with confidence.

Key features:

  • Ensure the homepage links to waiver page, deals, and blog
  • Coronavirus response is priority message over credit card
  • Sale has hero placement priority
  • Include GIF animation of airplane hygiene features


Landing Page

The Coronavirus landing page was broken into three parts in order to direct users to the most relevant information for their needs:

  1. Hero with alerts and custom icons associated with each hyperlink to the detailed policy.
  2. Lead in text in blue color block giving the user more context.
  3. Toggle view of all the different user scenarios and associated hyperlinks to get the user to pages with relevant information. This page would have all toggles closed upon page load and allow the user to expand based on their needs, reducing cognitive overload and call center volume.


Comeptive Analysis

Utilizing an agile process, we were able to rapidly iterate messaging and design throughout the first waves of Coronavirus fears. I kept daily tabs on how Alaska Airlines’ competitors were handling communications with customers. In doing so, I set up a matrix to determine where we were relative to other airlines to ensure we were exceeding customer expectations. This is just one iteration of this living document, which was included in all presentations to marketing and continually integrating adjustments to ensure we were providing the whole picture.

*This work contains Alaska Airlines propriety content and materials. It shall not be used for any purpose other than in consideration of employment or contracting of Tom Bauer.


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