Beacon

a membership based airline, catering to business travelers in New York and Boston.

Responsive Web App

Role
product and brand design

Team & Duration
product manager & development team (6 weeks)

The Problem
Beacon came to Carbon Five to build their MVP web app. They were on a tight release schedule, and while they knew what their pilots and concierge staff wanted from an app, they did not have an understanding of what their members would want.

The Challenge
Our challenge was to identify features that we thought to be launch critical, then design and build a two-sided experience; one for members’ to book flights and another for concierge staff to manage them.

To get ahead of the development team, I created paper prototypes which they were able to work off of, until wireframes and/or visual designs were ready.

Research
I started this project with a round of competitor research. I then created proto-personas based on my client’s understanding of their target demographic. The last research step in this phase of the project was a short survey sent out to people that fit the proto-personas. I asked three simple questions:

how often do you travel for work?
what device do you use to book and/or check in on flights?
what would make travel easier for you?

Once we had a prototype of the flight booking flow, I ran a round of usability testing with a small subset of users to see if the app’s main experience was intuitive to use.

I started with a barebones version of the style tiles for the dev team to work off of, this included colors, fonts and branding. I then layered on to it as the project went on, and we had more definition around the app’s visual design.

Learnings
We found that overwhelmingly the respondents who fit our personas:

Travelled one to three times a week
Thought boarding time was more important to know than flight time
Wished airline personnel knew about their personal preferences on flights (e.g. beverage choice, allergies, seat preference, etc.). This informed the design of our user profile views.

The Outcome
We launched with a responsive web app that allowed members to book flights and Beacon’s concierge staff to manage them.

We applied our learnings about frequent flyer preferences to the app’s profile view. Members were able to inform Beacon’s concierge staff of their preferred name, special requests, and allergies before even boarding a flight.