Disruptions Transformation
Major Australian Airline
Revolutionising how this airline recovers, empowers and supports customers when their flight is disrupted.
Expertise: UX, Experience Design
Industry: Aviation
Role: Senior Experience Designer (augmented with client) at Deloitte Digital
Date: 2024 – 25 (14 months)
Client name and project specific information has been redacted on this page for confidentiality.
CHALLENGE
How might we help a major airline reinvent the disruption experience for customers and staff by designing end-to-end experiences that better support customers and frontline teams through delays, cancellations, and recovery?
CONSTRAINTS
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High-stakes, real-world operations across airport, inflight, and post-flight journeys
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A deeply complex, global ecosystem or operational and corporate teams
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Multiple stakeholder groups (customers, pilots, cabin crew, airport staff, ops)
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Policy, service, and delivery dependencies
MY ROLE
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Embedded for 15 months as a Senior Experience Designer within the airline’s disruptions design team.
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Led end-to-end discovery and user research across employees and customers.
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Synthesised research into a clear discovery insights and strategy
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Designed holistically across the disruption journey
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Drove ideation and co-design with product owners to define the target state.
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Owned core end-to-end service design and UX artefacts
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Delivered UX/UI outputs with the app team
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Mapped operational flows underpinning initiatives
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Contributed to product strategy and executive alignment
Discover
Exploring a complex ecosystem with staff and customers
I conducted end-to-end design research with employees and customers, facilitating hybrid workshops with pilots, cabin crew, operations staff and support teams using empathy mapping, scenario exploration and ideation. We also ran narrative-led 1:1 customer interviews to validate expectations and test proposed disruption-experience concepts.
Workshop synthesis
Design thinking workshop templates
Whiteboard jam on current experience
Define
Establishing the current state experience
Following detailed discovery, I synthesised workshop outputs into a comprehensive current-state view, then used design thinking methods such as 5 Whys and empathy mapping to shape detailed blueprints that surfaced core pain points, opportunity areas and guiding design principles for the target-state experience.
Stakeholder mapping
Current state process mapping and '5 Whys'
One of many current state blueprints
Develop
Uncovering
opportunities for impact
With a clear current-state view, we uncovered the aspirational target experience by running ideation workshops with program streams and ‘Customer Champions’ made up of pilots, cabin crew and other staff. We consolidated ideas into an end-to-end experience for customers and employees through collaborative design jams, iterative concept development, and co-design sessions leads.
Target state ideation workshops, including best practice thought starters
Ideation workshops with pilots, cabin crew and support teams
Wireframing of the potential app experience
Exploring potential experience frameworks
Deliver
Designing an aspirational experience
I designed the program’s final artefacts, which included two narrative-led journey maps for key disruption scenarios (two-hour delay and overnight cancellation) that detailed personas, staff roles, pain points, dependencies, and supporting concept wireframes. I also created high fidelity screens alongside the App Team as well as clickable prototypes to demonstrate the future digital self-service experience, and produced blueprints to map the detailed flows underpinning each initiative.
UX screens were delivered across the journeys to bring the experience to life
Target state journeys
Initative blueprints to define operational delivery
Interactive Figma prototype for C-suite stakeholders
Impact
Improving disruptions, one flight at a time
With the target state defined, I collaborated with the client design lead and the head of the Disruptions Program to establish a core vision for the board, CEO and Global Leadership Team for the entirety of the Program to connect dozens of complex products and experiences into one core vision for the future.
Office-wide showcase