LAX INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Enhancements to the LAX Employee App
OVERVIEW
As the busiest origin and destination airport in the world, serviced by over 40,000 workers, LAX needed a better way for its employees to navigate daily operations—from shuttle tracking to badging to emergency alerts.
Over 12 weeks, I led a cross-functional design team to define a mobile-first experience that unified these critical services into a single platform.
IMPACT
APPROACH
Our goal was to define the MVP through a user-centered, research-led sprint that prioritized feasibility and long-term service impact.
Phases:
Discovery & Landscape Mapping
Synthesis & Journey Alignment
MVP Concepting & Prototyping
Prioritization & Planning
ROLE
Role: Embedded Design Director, leading a team of 5 designers + researchers within an agile pod
Services: Product strategy, stakeholder facilitation, design leadership, service design and conceptual design
After 6+ months of iterative design, we launched 7 new features with an adoption campaign, driving 4,000+ new users and a 42% boost in retention.
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.
Insights That Shaped the Work
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
With clarity around core user needs and MVP scope, we shifted into design execution—focusing on simplifying high-friction services and enabling intuitive access on the go.
I guided the team in defining key user flows, building scalable UI patterns, and creating a visual language that could grow with LAX’s broader employee service ecosystem.
Future Explorations
In addition to releasing a new feature or feature enhancement every sprint, we also created conceptual designs for the future state of Altitude.
Future feature explorations were rooted in refinements to the marketplace and an emphasis on personalization for the user, which would leverage an employee’s ID to determine their terminal location, role specifications and learned preferences over time.
The 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.
