UXContent Strategy: Growing Revenue in Mobile Bookings

Booking TaskFlow Re-Design - Alaska Airlines' Mobile App
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UX Content Strategy /6-Step UX Process



Margaret Seymour
~NN/g UXc
UC Berkeley ex Content Strategy

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Tell The Story of Your Design

Alaska Airlines Mobile App Homescreen

Summary

  • Audited content to propose improvements in the booking task flows of Alaska Airlines mobile application

    • Captured and critiqued the content on 24 screens following UX principles

    • Added design questions for generate design-thinking, in a slide deck

  • Then I defined prioritization categories

    • Used definitions to establish priorities

    • Priorities determined my order-of-build recommendations

  • Next, analyzed competitors' task flows in the Priority areas for a benchmark

    • Chose United Airlines mobile app

    • Focused on 6 most effective screens of content

  • Then I modulated the tone

  • Edited content to make it more scannable

  • Presented design insights

The 6-step Process
Tell The Story of Your Design

Content Strategy Process


See the whole deck!

Business Context

Scenario: The Engineering team is migrating everything attached to booking to a new stack. This creates an opportunity to update the booking design.

Role: Lead UX Content Strategist

"Your PM encourages your design team to think of, and prioritize, modest improvements, with regard to how people understand the change policy (since pandemic stuff is creating a lot of flight changes). You own the content strategy."

Tell The Story of Your Design

Alaska Airlines mobile app

User Goal and Task Flow

Goal: Choose a destination on your favorite airline using their mobile app.

Task: You're shopping for a flight to your dream vacation destination. You want to know about change policies before booking.

Audit success factor

  • Choose a User Goal that requires the critical task flow, or where drop-off is high. Here they were given.

Content Audit

Capture 26 screenshots—each step of users mobile booking task flow

Next, added comments and design questions using UX principles

  • Keep audience top-of-mind

  • Keep the business context in mind

  • Stay current on design heuristics

  • Use evidence-based research proven principles

Prioritize Build

To help focus I created a priority definition.

This made it easier to prioritize. It also kept business goals and audience in mind.

  • I reviewed the opportunities identified in the audit

  • Created a priority scale

  • Organized them into a short list of prioritized improvements, (3 ideal, 5 maximum)

  • Focused on language and messaging

  • Kept in the context of Mobile Apps

    • Mobile issues amplify problems, which creates churn

Tell The Story of Your Design

I created this to help explain

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is conducted like an internal audit.

  • An Internal audit takes a broad-ranging view of every possible improvement opportunity.

  • A Competitive analysis focuses on your priorities, highlights key differences between your competitor's experience and yours.

Competitive analyses often include more than one competitor. I chose 1 for the case study.


I researched competitor's Mobile Apps and chose United Airlines for key features

The United Airlines App Content:

  • Presented me with highly relevant information

    • Deals from my city, picked-up flights where I left off

Then I highlighted differences in the
user experience areas prioritized.
Modulating Tone

Voice & Tone

  • Voice describes how a company or brand sounds overall.

  • Tone describes the way that Voice changes (modulates) over time, or in response to a situation.

  • More playful tones may be used, for example, when there’s not a lot at stake (end of task).

  • More serious tones are effective when users might be upset or disappointed. 


Tone should be modulated with intention across the User Journey.
Tell The Story of Your Design

I re-wrote one screen in the booking flow, making it shorter and improving tone.

Edit for Scannability

This is your heading

A content strategist needs to consider how people will be using the app.

  • Users booking a trip want to get something done.

  • Research shows delays hurt user satisfaction. Too much delay causes drives users away.

  • They scan content

  • Make it easier to write for scanning patterns


Choose one screen in your booking flow that relates to cancellation or change policies, which isn’t very scannable currently. 


Then, make it more scannable. You might do so by breaking up the text into sensible sections, by adding headers, by frontloading (putting the most important stuff first), removing non-essential info, and/or by improving the concision of the writing.