Case Study · Alaska Airlines · 2017–2021
Guest Experience
For four years, my team and I led research, design, and strategy for Alaska's guest experience, serving over 48 million travelers a year, with one goal: to build an airline people love.
- Disciplines
- Product Design · Design Leadership · User Research · Design Strategy
- Categories
- Aviation · Mobile · Service Design · Research
4.9 / 5
iOS rating, nearly 2× reviews
+68%
Food pre-orders, first month
+16%
App bookings, up from 10%
2
J.D. Power awards
Context
Alaska's mobile app was a polished experience after its 2015 refresh, but years of underinvestment had left it carrying real technical and design debt. My team was brought in to revitalize it.
My role
I led design across four scrum teams (iOS, Android, kiosks, and airport screens), running two parallel tracks: research and discovery on one, strict product delivery on the other.
Research
We invested heavily in understanding the day-of-travel journey before designing for it:
- A longitudinal diary study with observational shadowing, tracking how passengers' behavior and emotion shifted across each touchpoint.
- Sentiment coding and segmentation by traveler type (frequent flyer, business, solo leisure, and leisure with companions) to surface shared patterns.
- Co-design workshops along the West Coast, where participants built their ideal app from foam-board navigation and milestone cards, from D-48 to delays to arrival.
- Synthesis into an executive-ready narrative that fed data-driven roadmaps across every line of business.
Strategy
Post-Covid, the emphasis shifted toward business outcomes. The hypothesis: a personalized, data-driven home screen would lift engagement and satisfaction by adapting to individual needs and market demands. I built a flexible framework for the home screen that responds to three inputs at once:
- Real-time market trends
- Business performance metrics
- User personalization data (loyalty tier, trip status, signed-in or anonymous)
To test it without brand bias, I prototyped the full journey under a fictional airline, Logo Air, on a grayscale interface, validating both mental models and the concept itself.
Outcome
The redesign landed well internally and externally. App bookings trended up roughly 16%, growing from 10% of all bookings; food pre-orders rose 68% in the first month; the iOS rating held at 4.9 out of 5 with nearly double the reviews; and the December 2020 BOGO campaign was Alaska's best to date. The same period produced two J.D. Power awards for app satisfaction. Beyond the home screen, the work spanned major releases: food pre-order, same-day flight change, a CEO-sponsored Flight Status redesign across Alaska Air Group, baggage tracking, check-in, and irregular-operations recovery.