No panic at the airport: You + your orders on AirAsia's app
Context
AirAsia launched a super app to conquer regional markets beyond its best-known product, flights. They wanted to redesigned the way orders were displayed on their app.
Strategic value
Delivered an improved flow for order management and a new feature for users to organise their own orders.
Objective
- To uncover the user's pain points through a UX audit, user interviews, and usability tests
- To make order management more intuitive at all stages of the customer journey
Results
- Increase in ease of use
- Client looking to implement the feature
Our UX Journey with AirAsia
Starting out
Our project began with one simple goal: reduce the number of complaints about the AirAsia super app on the App Store.
Many of these complaints were due to back-end tech issues.
Being a solely UX team of 6, this was not our focus. Nevertheless, upon discovering that most complaints were about Flights, we pivoted to our first iteration of the problem statement:
How might we make it easier for customers to access crucial flight information on the AirAsia app?
Issues we encountered: narrow scope
- Inaccessible region-locked features that we had to redesign
- Fully remote alignment
- Unfamiliarity with the client's international market, and thus
- Uncertainty on how to scope our project
On the last point: our original plan to zoom in only on order management for Flights felt too narrow. One of the points I brought up was that complaints on the App Store were, after all, just ONE data point.
While the client asked to improve the order management process, it in fact spanned at least 7 different customer journeys across the super app's various categories.
Furthermore, it was that raw, primal sort of panic at the airport (that I wish upon not even my worst enemies) which drove people to lodge complaints. There was certainly more.
With struggle comes clarity, scope, & uncovered assumptions
With our tight timeline, we had to narrow our scope. But which should we prioritise?
The Team's Thought Process [Draft 1]
Prioritise AirAsia's Flights and Hotels because
- Flights are AirAsia's best selling product
- Hotels are the natural thing accompanying flights and people book them together, and would therefore be the second-most popular order category
This did not sit well with me as I realised this was driven by assumptions:
- How did we know Hotels would accompany Flights?
- We had no data of how many people booked hotels with their flights on the app
- We had no data that people even booked hotels on the app
- We had no data about the quantity of orders made for Rides, Food Delivery etc.
Upon digging further and communicating with our stakeholders to gain more data points, I realised that how we thought was due to ... *unwraps shiny gift wrapper* ... our cultural biases.
We lived in Singapore, where AirAsia's primary product was its flights. However, as a regional heavyweight, AirAsia's other offerings were solidly thriving in other regions:
- the client's food business was growing exponentially in South-East Asia
- the client was seeking to gain a foothold in ride-hailing in the region
- (case in point: halfway through our project, the local newspaper published that AirAsia was bringing its rides feature to Singapore)
Finally, we settled on a problem statement
How might we present order information for flight, hotel, food, and ride in the super app so users can easily find the information they need at all stages of the order journey?
Our research revealed what to focus on: better [past] order organisation
Looking at how competitor apps such as Grab, Deliveroo, United Airlines, and CDG Zig organised their orders, we learnt that they...
- had overviews of all orders
- placed more emphasis on past rather than upcoming orders
From surveying and talking to users, we uncovered that users wanted to...
- search for orders easily
- categorise their orders by type
- see all their orders at a glance
We rolled up our sleeves, brainstorming and prototyping solutions
Based on our data and usability testing with 10 users, we created prototypes that ...
- introduced order overviews
- redesigned order cards and what information users saw on them, and
- separated past and upcoming orders.
Aligning our prototype with our client's product vision
*cue divine harp playing and angelic choir voices*
While we were researching and iterating our solutions, we learnt from our client that they were working towards a borderless app.
Given their current reality of having region-locked features, this was big news.
With this exciting piece of news in mind, we began our product discovery for a solution that would contribute to that product vision.
Cue our assumptions:
- Assumption #1: Users who would benefit most from the borderless features would be heavy users of the app
- Assumption #2: Heavy users would use the app's various categories (e.g. Rides, Food, Flights) across countries
- Assumption #3: Such users would have varied mental models of organising their orders
- Assumption #4 (inspired by data): These users want to organise their orders their own way
From here, we imagined:
What if users had the power to organise their orders however they wanted?
Why not entrust the user with even more power?
Enter: the Folders feature
Our research pointed out that competitor apps...
- made it easy to view prices and
- share or download receipts
And users tended to..
- think about their orders through their experiences (whether work or personal),
- travel / ride / order food with others, and
- return to past orders to calculate their finances
We iterated a solution where:
- Users could categorise their orders however they wanted;
- could easily keep track of their finances,
- generate business claims in a single click, and
- easily share an entire experience (via the Folder) with others
Good news!
- Our client expressed pleasure with our work, especially at the Folders feature.
- Some findings surprised them, e.g. users wanting to see prices of past orders
- Other findings validated what they had ideated but not tested
They’re looking to implement the Folders feature after making their app borderless.
Closing thoughts & reflections
Like the rush one gets upon setting foot in a new city courtesy of an AirAsia flight, I found this project especially rewarding.
Perhaps the most striking habits I take away from this project were to
- cultivate trusting relationships with teammates and clients,
- communicate openly and early about our projects’ challenges,
- resolve assumptions early in the project,
- throw light on cultural differences, and
- pay attention to details, including the order of UT scenarios.
If I were to do this project again?
Under the same constraints that the client and my team faced, I'd look into approaching the project from a generative approach to increase our output of creative UI solutions before evaluating them with guerrilla testing.