Alaska Airlines: Alaska’s World
ROLE
Senior UX Designer
DURATION
2 Months
TEAM
Project Manager
TOOLS
Qualtrics, Miro, Figma, Microsoft Excel
“For the same price, you just get more.”
Alaska Airlines is a major American airline headquartered in SeaTac, Washington, within the Seattle metropolitan area. It is the fifth-largest airline in North America. As of 2020, the airline employs over 16,000 people and has been ranked by J. D. Power and Associates as having the highest customer satisfaction of traditional airlines for twelve consecutive years.
CONTEXT
Alaska Airlines' "Alaska World" is an intranet created to support the airline's current and former employees. It offers access to HR resources, company news, communication tools, training materials, operational information, and more. Employees can use it to stay informed, collaborate, and access essential resources, fostering a sense of community and facilitating day-to-day operations within the company.
OVERVIEW
Diving into the data behind each employee’s thoughts and concerns. My close collaboration with the team was instrumental in shaping, building, and delivering a user-friendly intranet in an employee-facing context.
CHALLENGE
How can we encourage current and former employees to use Alaska's World as their primary source for company-related information?
After conducting interviews with each content owner, I gained a better understanding of Alaska's World's 8 different divisions.
STAKEHOLDERS
NOC/SOC: Network & Systems Operations Control
ITS: IT Services
Guest CARE: Ticket Agent
Inflight: Flight Attendants
M&E: Maintenance & Engineering
Back Office: Admin
Stations: Ramp Operators
Flight Ops: Pilots
ROLE
Create a discovery plan.
Assess Alaska’s World capabilities.
Analyze quantitative information.
Document qualitative information.
Establish relationships with division leaders.
Strategize recommendations.
To address the stakeholder’s navigation concerns with Alaska's World, I thoroughly researched the intranet's content.
DESIGN PROCESS
To improve the user experience and increase website traffic, I conducted an audit of the content issues found on the website, such as the confusing site navigation, duplicate content that cluttered the site, outdated information that misled visitors, and broken links that frustrated users. This is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the website's content, and it identified several areas where improvements could be made.
01
Content Audit
To ensure the accuracy of the audit. I thoroughly examined a comprehensive Qualtrics report that spanned 2000 pages for each 8 divisions. This report contained both qualitative and quantitative data, which I carefully analyzed to gain a complete understanding of the findings.
Due to NDA, I am not able to provide the specific document. Below are a few common concerns from employees who participated in the survey.
02
Content Analysis
“Censoring comments renders the information useless. Being misinformed is worse than being uninformed.”
“The search feature is painful and hard to find older articles.”
With the information from the content audit and analysis, I put together an affinity map for stakeholders to better visualize the cause of the confusion when using Alaska’s World.
03
Affinity Map
OUTCOME
After reviewing all the information I collected about Alaska's World, I created a PDF deck outlining recommendations. Ultimately, it was determined that a website alone would not suffice for all divisions. The best way to deliver information to both current and former employees would be through a combination of a website and a mobile app.
During my time with Alaska Airlines, I found that the intranet can be a complicated space for a large amount of content. Increased employee engagement is a multi-step process, and consistent communication is key, especially with eight different divisions.
TAKEAWAY