WHAT

gabriel gomes 





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The new digital experience for one of the biggest airlines.




client
Avianca

live
avianca.com



The challenge

Design the best experience for the new Avianca’s global website.


A global project evolving designers from all around the globe to develop a global product, design and evolve a design system and implant the experience.


the beginning

Getting team onboarded (3 🇧🇷, 1 🇬🇧, 5 🇨🇴, 1🇳🇿,1🇻🇪,1🇪🇸). Framing the challenge. Understanding previous projects. Discovering WOK. Starting experimenting.

Some challenges: New language, the Colombian design team were new to the firm, design a consistent design process, deliver something fast.


our process


Getting ready to create the experience

Tim Harris, the design leader was working already with Avianca for around a year and had done a bunch of other projects like a future vision for their digital experience and an experience guideline which we used as baseline and input to start running the sprints. His amazing experience with the client and with design made a lot of things possible and a lot easier to make decisions.

Problem understood. We split the team on two: on one reviewing the current website and suggesting a new and more organized sitemap/structure and other exploring concepts and ideas for future pages. With the new defined structure, we started running sprints to design and redesign the experience.

This is how we organized our cells:


The outcomes of the workshops were definitions of business directions for the project, personas, journey of the user, and hypothesis to be validated.


CRAFTING A CONSISTENT PROCESS

In the beginning without a structured process, after the start of a sprint we had many problems with approvals deadlines and the client giving constant feedback with different visions for the same flow. We had to get things done fast. We had to get things approved. We had to have stakeholder consistency on the vision we were designing for each sprint. We had to gather information and requirements in an efficient way.


As the process evolved, we decided to use the first day of the sprint as an “interaction workshop” with had some nice outcomes:
- An unified vision for the flow that we were going to start, understanding the business objective.
- Gather information from stakeholders about the flow
- Prioritize information architecture according to business
- Generate hypothesis on how the business would generate value to users
+ bonus: Avianca designers started to get more interested about our methodology and the way we were dealing with the problems. Culture change ahead!


After the workshop, we were ready to start drawing hypothesis.

The following diagram shows the final sprint process we got after many trials, errors and successes:


On this pdf you can see the detailed day-to-day sprints process and outcomes.


After the workshop we had get everything wrapped up in a beautiful prototype created after intense hours of collaboration and ideation inside the design cell. Here we had efforts on bringing the user perspective to the work. With the prototype, our internal team (designers, coders and functional team) would give feedback as sometimes we were defining new components and we didn’t wanted lack of consistency between the cells. After the decision and final adjustments on the design we would bring to the user, we prepared an Invision prototype to the client for final adjustments and approvals.


Here are some samples of the screens we had as output of that process:





That process was repeated for the website key screens and after the approvals, the deliver were made to the front-end team through Zeplin.

By the end the design culture of the client were evolved and that were working with us close as one team. The recently joined designers from Colombia were making decisions and proactively collaborating, understanding applying and coaching the design process.


Some learnings:
1. Do not build it alone, be proactive! - Larger teams needs constant interaction and conversation
2. Approvals should have clear deadlines and the process should be clear
3. Cultural change is a consequence of good design applied with consistency and collaboration
4. Language & cultural exchange can be funny, but sometimes stressful - prior preparation can avoid surprises
5. Having lead designers on the entire process and micro decisions were great and created a safe place for explorations and risks
6. Have always stakeholders from different areas aligned on a single vision



see it live


The end. The project will be live soon and for now you can feel a bit jealous of the awesome view we had from the office:








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