Case Study · Alaska Airlines · 2019–2021
Airport Lobby of the Future
Replacing Alaska Airlines' aging, expensive kiosk fleet with a mobile-first, iPad-based check-in experience that sped up the lobby and cut hardware cost.
- Disciplines
- Product Design · Design Leadership · Service Design
- Categories
- Aviation · Self-Service · iPadOS · 0→1
48 sec
Transaction time, down from 2–3 min
60%
Lower hardware cost ($15k → $9k)
10 / qtr
Release cadence, up from 10 / yr
79
Airports rolled out
Context
Alaska Airlines' airport kiosks were expensive to maintain, inflexible, and slow to evolve under heavy technical constraints, with time on task running two to three minutes per session. The airline made a strategic call to move off its legacy kiosks and find a replacement that improved both the guest experience and lobby throughput.
My role
I led design for the iPadOS self-service app, partnering with Lanna Liu on hardware and human factors across a cross–Air Group initiative.
The challenge
How might we leverage a burning platform alongside mobile growth to increase self-service bag tagging, reduce dependence on full-service counters, and raise lobby throughput?
Approach
The answer pushed the journey to the device already in the guest's hand. Guests print bag tags from their own phone and move through check-in quickly, with iPads, in partnership with Apple, replacing the bespoke NCR kiosk hardware.
- Mobile-first bag tagging: guests tag bags from their own device, easing reliance on full-service counters.
- iPad over bespoke hardware: off-the-shelf iPads replace NCR kiosks, dropping per-unit cost and letting the experience ship as software.
Process
The work ran across four phases over two years:
- Future-lobby workshops (2019): framing the vision for a next-generation lobby.
- Research and discovery (2019–2020): studying guest behavior and the constraints to design within.
- Product development (2020): building the iPad self-service experience.
- Pilot and learnings (2021): launching at Boise and measuring against CSAT and usability goals.
Outcome
The pilot launched at Boise International (BOI) in January 2021 and met its CSAT and usability targets. At the new iPad bag-tag stations, transaction time dropped from two to three minutes to about 48 seconds, a roughly 3X reduction Alaska cited publicly. Moving from bespoke kiosks to iPads cut hardware cost by 60%, from $15k to $9k per unit, and shifted release cadence from roughly ten per year toward ten per quarter, since the experience now shipped as software. The product rolled out across 79 airports.