BLACKBIRD POST CHECKOUT REDESIGN

BlackBird was an air travel platform that let passengers charter flights and open their unused seats to others. This significantly lowered the price point and opened access to thousands of general aviation airports across the United States.

After months of product restructuring, BlackBird released a new booking flow in July 2019 that met our new dynamic pricing algorithm and aviation marketplace regulatory requirements. It was time to align the post-checkout experience to the new paradigm.

For the post-checkout redesign projects, I owned the UX and UI and led stakeholder alignment with our internal Operations, Customer Experience, and Legal & Compliance teams.

Role: UX, UI, COMMS DESIGN

PLATFORM: iOS, ANDROID

Finding Areas for Improvement

Collaborating with our Head of Customer Experience, I mapped out the full BlackBird user journey (discovery → booking → flying) to identify areas of user pain point.

PROBLEMS

• Guests often miss entering passenger details after payment because they think they’re done once they see their trip itinerary

• Customer Success spends a lot of time following up with guests about missing passenger details

• We cannot communicate reminders or updates to guests in-app

FIXES

• Reorganize the UX to reduce the problem of users skipping passenger details 

• Build automated in-app reminders and email comms to relay reminders and updates. A subset of these emails are dedicated to users who miss entering passenger details despite the new flow.

A Re-prioritization

In the old post-booking flow, users see their flight itinerary immediately after check-out. This falsely signals that they’re done booking and users close the app and skip the passenger details entry. To reduce this problem, I swapped the order of the flight itinerary with the passenger details scene. To add a second layer of protection, I added automated comms (in-app alert, push notification, and email) to catch stragglers.

The missing passenger detail reminder email is part of a suite of automated email comms that our UI Designer and I were designing at the time.

PROBLEMS

• No consideration for the white glove check-in experience, which is what distinguishes Blackbird from commercial flight

• Failed to anticipate common post-booking inquiries

• Fails to meet marketplace and FAA requirements (i.e., does not display information on aircraft, pilot, flight types)

• Destination image library is out of date and not scalable

FIXES

• Update check-in info to truly reflect BlackBird services  

• Address common guest inquiries with access to both self-serve resources as well as a direct line to customer service for tricky or urgent matters

• Include all missing marketplace and FAA details

• Update destination image library to be scalable

• Update overall post-completion UI to reflect new branding

New Destination Image Library

BlackBird pre-marketplace only flew to a finite set of destinations. This meant that every destination had to correspond to a specific location image.

The new BlackBird allowed you to fly into thousands of general aviation airports. For scalability and visual consistency, we moved to a finite set of branded illustrations. For our most popular regions, we designated a corresponding illustration. For less frequented destinations, we employed a generic one.