Creating a Frictionless Experience
Dallas, TX
In aviation, employees typically bid for their shifts every other month, with schedules awarded based on factors like seniority and the airline's needs. At Southwest Airlines, they have been doing this manually, by paper for the last 50 years. I led the UX strategy at Southwest Airlines to help transform and optimize this scheduling process and design an easy to use, responsive web app solution used today by 18K+ employees.
The end product is a streamlined, responsive web app that provides employees with a high degree of control over their work lives. The solution automated the shift-awarding process, which previously required a 10-person team and one week of manual work, and reduced it to a task that could be completed in minutes. This resulted in a massive increase in efficiency and significant cost and time savings for Southwest Airlines.
Here's a closer look at a few key features of the final product.
New feature announcements
Whenever a new feature was being launched, we understood that every piece of friction can cause a user to drop off. We wanted to make it simple and intuitive.
How? Minimize the number of steps and use clear, simple language.
- Onboarding doesn't have to be boring. Use engaging visuals and a human tone to make the process feel friendly and welcoming.
- It is important to strike a balance between providing enough guidance to prevent confusion and over-explaining everything.
- The goal is to empower the user to explore on their own, not to force them down a rigid path.
Personalized dashboard experience
When users login to view and manage their work schedule, we wanted to provide the most critical information immediately.
How?
- Focus on at-a-glance clarity and paying attention to information hierarchy.
- Minimize the number of steps to get to core tasks: request time off, view open shifts, so forth.
- Personalization and user control: allow users to view their schedules by month or week.
- Familiarity: design language and patterns consistent with how people view their calendars and think about schedules.
