United Airlines | AiR Agent

Client

United Airlines

Timeline

6 months

role

UI/UX, Design Systems, Mobile, Service Design

tools

Figma, Illustrator, Da Vinci Resolve, Blender

An intelligent multi-modal system to streamline the Lobby Agent's experience.

You should be on our strategy team...some recommendations that we are thinking about like streamlined kiosks, NFC, and new ideas like how we can use computer vision to better greet customers
- Jason Flint (Director, Digital Delivery at United Airlines)

Envisioned Service Interaction (Video Demo)

Strategic Design

Employee Tools Impact

Enhancing employee tools was one of the client’s strategic pillars for growth. Our team chose to support this pillar for our Capstone Project as we saw huge potential for interventions in this space to impact employee, customer, and business outcomes:

For 17,000 CSRs: Enterprise tools used by employees have not been elevated to the same standards as customer-facing tools.
For 165 million customers: As the first point of contact for passengers arriving at the airport, the experience of CSRs is intricately tied to customer experiences.
For the business: Interventions in this space would support the airline’s strategic pillars, and differentiate it from competitors.

Current state of the lobby

Jobs to be Done (JTBD)

Help me get customers through standard tasks as quickly as possible so that I can keep the lines moving.

Research

We wanted to understand the current role of a lobby agent and their experiences.

Main Takeaway

Customers use self-service options to varying degrees. This affects how they interact with agents, and how they queue and behave in the lobby more generally.

Overlooked area of research: United Airlines as a business wants customers to self-service more, but did not train agents to support this initiative.