Role: Visual Designer - This role was primarily visually design-focused though it did consist of imagining new features in which UX was also addressed.

Audience: Customers for the public facing (pre and post-login) experience

Opportunity

Alaska Airlines asked another designer and myself to come on to do some exploratory designs for their website. The goal was to not overthink the limitations of code and come up with some fresh and modern designs using their brand guide. At this time, Alaska Airlines had just acquired Virgin America. A major key in this was being able to unite the two sites without losing any functionality.

Process

My role as a Visual and UX designer on this project was to bring a pair of fresh eyes to reimagine the Alaska Airlines booking experience. I hit the ground running on this project, starting with several whiteboarding sessions in the first week. From there, I began concepting new ideas, utilizing photography and illustration. Virgin America is known for its fun and simple experience while Alaska Airlines has a vast destination possibilities. It was necessary to make booking a bit easier as well as incorporate new features to engage the user. Explorations beyond whiteboarding took place in Illustrator, where I hashed out multiple possibilities for buttons, controls, and other web components. As there are no bad ideas, iteration was vital to the process in order to deliver the most options to the design team.

Solution

One of the things I wanted to bring to the project was what I would like to see as a customer. We almost always visit travel sites to book a planned trip while our email is being spammed with deals and destinations that I wouldn't usually take a second look at. I incorporated that into the site by showing the users where they could go outside of the booking convention. At the end of the engagement, I was able to provide the design team at Alaska with several explorations of different components and elements as well as high-fidelity comps of the homepage and Join Now page.