This was a rather quick project itself that required some different research and was heavily based on iterations. We got a one liner document saying that we needed to enable the possibility of offering some product on the boarding pass page. The project was not to change the boarding pass itself, but the page where we display it.
Scope
- Increase sales of ancillary products
- Improve boarding pass page
- Study how users perceive the digital boarding pass page
The thing is that from previous research, we found out that users has some degree of product blindness. If they perceive something as a product, they just ignore. So our first idea was to present Travel Tips: some tips related to the trip that would help users engange with products. The idea was very well received.
Travel tips
During some users testing most users would still have product blindness towards this. The biggest piece on the screen was still the boarding pass itself. On another round of interviews we found out that users wouldn’t be frustrated by not seeing the oficial boarding pass on that screen before printing/downloading. So with that in mind we decided to reduce the emphasys on the boarding pass iteself (like most competitors are doing) and try a different approach: we used the gamification strategy to try to increase perception on products.
Afterthoughts
“For this, I learned that the best solution is not always the one that we should stick to it. It is always about compromises and reaching goals.”
Meeting business goals with users goals
The users would not see the printable version of the boarding pass upront, but that caused no frustration at all. The idea of “upgrading” your boarding pass was well received by users that could now see and understand the advantages of adding products to improve their flight experience. The only problem with this idea was the development effort to achieve this.
As designers we need to understand what are the business goals and the users goals. On this specific case there was no way to measure the conversion rate on products because we have no tools for that. On the usability testing it was proven to be a good idea, but the uncertainty regarding profit was very high. Because of this the business decided to have the previous version (Travel Tips) as the MVP for the project, since the developers estimated that that would be done very fast. Any increase in conversion would be appreciated since they were not expecting that an upsell on the Boarding Pass page was even possible.