LAX EMPLOYEE APP
Designing new and enhanced features to expand the all-in-one app for LAX airport employees
CHALLENGE
As the busiest origin and destination airport in the world, serviced by over 40,000 workers, LAX partnered with Designit to enhance their employee experience, modernize airport operations, and set themselves as the gold standard of airports.
After launching the MVP of Altitude, with 500 users, Designit continued engagement to further augment the digital experience for airport workers with the primary goal of aiding their day-to-day tasks through the app experience.
DETAILS
The team had to delicately balance honoring what was built with introducing impactful improvements to the app. Data insights paired with user research told the story of what was working well, and what needed to be addressed. We prioritized a set of features that would drive high value in a short amount of time while exploring features for the future in parallel.
Core outputs included:
Competitive and market research assessment
User interviews and concept testing
Feature prioritization, product roadmap
New features + several enhancements
Conceptual designs for 5 additional new features to test further
ROLE
Role / Design Director, Project Lead
Team / 2 product designers, 1 product managers, 1 business strategist, 6 developers and several business stakeholders
Duration / 8 months
Altitude is the web app Designit partnered with LAX to create for airport workers at LAX earlier in 2023. Phase II of the engagement focused on defining a strategy for achieving LAX’s ultimate goal of making Altitude an indispensable tool for their workforce.
The first step in achieving this goal was to increase adoption. Our team set out to expand Altitude with enhancements to existing features and new features to provide further value to employees. This coincided with an engagement strategy to drive awareness and adoption.
Taking over mid-flight
Approach
RESEARCH
In the first 6 weeks of Phase II, we conducted quick but thorough concept testing with employees to test initial enhancements and new ideas for Altitude. The goal was to validate our hypotheses on what would drive the most value and adherence for employees. We then continued to conduct weekly observational research.
ENGAGEMENT & DATA
Through collaborative working sessions, our team aligned with LAX on the appropriate metris to measure success (5,000 person adoption and 75% return users 3-5x over the course of a month). This was achieved successfully through engagement strategy tactics, which included flyers and posters across employee lounges, a recurring newsletter to LAWA employees, and an emphasis on share incentives through Discounts.
DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Within the first month of re-engagement, the product and design leads (myself and 2 others) reviewed the existing backlog to determine which features should be initially prioritized. Once concluding research, we leveraged concept testing insights to drive new feature ideas. Our research studies provided confidence in prioritizing an employee marketplace (discounts), a shuttle tracker, improving the problem reporting and working towards a more personalized experience overall through the homepage and other features.
We worked in agile delivery sprints, including 2 weeks of requirement writing and observational research, 2-3 weeks of design, 2 weeks of development and one week of QA.
Research
Airport Worker Survey – An online survey to gain a current-state understanding of airport worker’s perception, reactions and experiences with Altitude.
Concept Testing – Evaluate prototypes of an enhanced Altitude experience to explore attitudes and perceptions about features in the context of their employee experience.
Key Insights
REPORTING ISSUES
Report a Problem is seen as a valuable feature, but it needs to account for additional nuances.
GUEST-FACING SUPPORT
Considering how often employees are asked questions, Altitude would value expanding its list of FAQs and guest resources
DISCOUNTS
Altitude’s Discounts can further support employees by helping them save time and discover businesses in and out of LAX.
OPTIMIZED MOVEMENT
Beyond Altitude’s ‘Commuter Options’ feature, live traffic and guest surge data would address a critical employee pain point.
Feature Prioritization
To inform our design direction, we began by analyzing data from the previous phase of work, alongside key insights from within the app itself. We also conducted competitor research and leveraged GWI data to shape the hypotheses we wanted to test.
The goal was to quickly get these ideas in front of employees in a tangible way through prototypes—ranging from low-fidelity sketches and journey maps to higher-fidelity concepts (specific formats would evolve as needed). By engaging with employees early and often, we were able to uncover key insights that would ultimately guide us toward more impactful design solutions.
Detailed Design
Improved reporting process
While the team explored new features, we identified quick wins that would improve the MVP experience of Altitude. ‘Report A Problem’ proved to be an important feature in Phase I of our engagement, but the flow was too complex for the immediacy of this feature’s use.
We consolidated a 3 step process into a single screen to reduce that complexity. Contrary to initial assumption, users actually preferred one screen with multiple fields rather than having to walk through several screens, especially in a moment of crisis when reporting an urgent problem.
Employee discounts to drive adherence
One of the first features unanimously agreed upon was a marketplace for employee discounts. To no surprise, we learned through interviews that employees would be most likely to open the Altitude app throughout the day or week if there was a benefit to them.
LAX employees already receive a range of 15-40% off of businesses throughout the airport, as well as small discounts outside of the airport.
Shuttle tracking for a simpler commute
In the earlier weeks while validating concepts through testing, we continually sought out opportunities to incorporate widely used sites into Altitude.
We quickly learned that, aside from guest management, commuting to work was one of the biggest pain points for many employees at LAX. Since most employees use designated airport shuttles on a regular basis, we opted to include an existing API for tracking shuttles into the app to help employees plan their commute to work.
Elevating career development
Based on existing data from LAX, we learned that a substantial amount of employees regularly visit their careers site to seek new opportunities for themselves or for family/friends. We determined that this would be a fairly light development effort and included it as a quick add to the web app.
Future Explorations
In addition to releasing a new feature or feature enhancement every sprint, we also made space to iterate on future explorations to develop a realistic backlog for Phase III of Altitude.
Future feature explorations were focused on refinements to the marketplace and an emphasis on personalization for the user, using an employee’s ID to determine their terminal location, role specifications and learned preferences over time.
Outcome
At the end of the engagement, the team delivered 5 new features and several other feature fixes and enhancements to advance the overall user experience. To date, Altitude has reached nearly 10k unique users out of the 40,000 employees.
Unique sessions and stickiness of the experience continues to be a reach goal for Altitude. Based on continued research and ongoing discussions, we suspect that this is due to the fact that the experience is only accessible in a web browser, along with the outstanding need for a more personalized experience. These are the core focuses’ planned for Phase III of the partnership with LAX/LAWA to evolve the app.
