Alaska Airlines

Mobile UX Designer

Electronic Bag Tag with Alaska App

2015

As the Mobile UX Designer at Alaska Airlines (2015-2016), I was tapped for a project with the former CX Innovation Lab to create the first ever user experience for an Electronic Bag Tag that partnered with our guest mobile app.

This work was ahead of its time and set the foundation for an official relaunch several years later in 2022.

Background

This product was a first of its kind. It leveraged bluetooth technology to sync Alaska's customer mobile app to e-ink screen bag tags. It went into beta testing with selected participants. Due to cost, it never took off, but is still deemed one of Alaska's most innovative products.

Team:

Product Design Manager

Mobile UX Designer (Me)

Visual Designer

Product Manager (from CX Innovation Lab)

Baggage SME

Objective

Research and design a way to seamlessly integrate the electronic bag tagging process into the existing check-in flow.

Customer Persona

Targeting a specific customer persona set us in the right direction to design a minimum viable product (MVP) and avoid feature creep. This persona served as the requirements when recruiting the beta group.

Elite tiered members

Elite tiered members- called MVPs at Alaska, are individuals who fly frequently with the airline. One of the benefits of being an MVP Gold or MVP Gold 75k is a free checked bag.

By requiring the beta group to be MVP Gold status or higher, we avoided having to include the payment process for baggage.

Travel with a checked bag

In order to test the hardware capacity and receive more comprehensive feedback from the beta group, we honed in on MVPs that travel alone at least 1 time per week with 1 checked bag.

Focusing the UX to sync with 1 electronic bag tag helped to limit the scope.

iPhone user

Our data shows that most MVPs are iPhone users. We directed our efforts at designing and developing for our larger user group.

The intent was to design for iPhone first and test with the beta group that's easier to recruit for. Future work on electronic bag tag may be done for Android.

Current check-in flow

Electronic bag tag check-in flow

Initial Concepts & Testing

After reviewing the concept with developers, it was discovered that the technology used would not be bluetooth pairing. Therefore, the 'Bluetooth Pairing Request' modal could be removed. The design was later modified so that only users without bluetooth enabled would be notified to turn it on.

Through testing, I quickly realized that the review page was unnecessary. This information is already on the page before they begin the check-in process ("flight card"). The feedback was that they had already seen this information and it did not provide them any benefit to see it again.

Changed based on technology requirements

Removed based on feedback

We had to keep in mind that users may not be ready to use the electronic bag tag at the time of check in. Therefore, an important element to the user experience was how customers would be able to receive reminder notifications.

User Testing

Alaska Board Room in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
11 users, all frequent flyers
Qualitative interviews

Outcomes: Some users felt that, "[in-app] notifications are easy to dismiss" and "[push notifications] don't look any different than other notifications, like text messages." But the majority felt that this would be helpful. The desired experience would be to receive a time-sensitive push notification ~2.5 hours prior to their flight. Note: this feature was later descoped but may be implemented in the future.

Another area of interest was how users would like to see flight card reminder indications. In order to retain legibility and task hierarchy, a new line item was created for the electronic bag tag.

Final Design & User Flows

One of the trickiest aspects of this project was how to alert users in the case of errors and how to allow them the ability to update their bag tag if anything went wrong. The final user flows demonstrates just how many scenarios a customer may face. Our goal was to integrate the electronic bag tag into the check-in flow as seemlessly as possible, but if errors were to occur, we wanted users to see specific and informative messaging.