User Experience Consultant

What did I do at KLM After-Sales?

Translating AKQA designs into workable mobile pages and supporting team delivery of enhanced user-friendly features.

At KLM there was a lot of noise and inconsistency between the designs from AKQA and the implemented production environment.

My task was to work closely with an art director to overhaul the AKQA designs and then drive the development team to deliver the right features whilst keeping a holistic overview of the navigation and translation of mobile pages.

I capitalized on opportunities to do research and prototype concepts. At the same time, KLM was busy with merging their business with AirFrance. This was quite a bumpy journey.

Specialties
  • User research
  • Customer Journeys
  • Jobs-to-be-done’s
  • Strategy
  • Product Design
  • Prototyping
  • North Star Concept
  • Design System
Tools
  • Sketch
  • Principle
  • Lookback
  • Trello
  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Hipchat

KLM After-Sales

The transition from desktop designs to mobile designs

Mobile-first

Mobile-first is almost a given these days, but sometimes numbers still point towards usage on other media. It could be because your mobile version sucks or you prefer the resolution on your laptop.

This project began in 2016 and things were already shifting towards mobile rapidly. So, my advice, almost always will be, to design for mobile in the first place and translate later for other resolutions. Focus on the most important things initially and then add extra comfort for larger screens. Mobile enhancement for the win!

At KLM a lot of the detail pages were not designed for mobile so I spent the most time redesigning these screens.

Translating tables to mobile always requires an excellent understanding of the data you want to display. Instead of creating a mobile monster by introducing scrollbars, I redesigned the table for mobile. The result is far more user-friendly than an ugly scrollable table IMHO.

Creating new navigation and an improved user experience

Improve Navigation

Before designing the navigation for an after-sales portal it’s crucial to understand why people use it in the first place.

I undertook research at the KLM departure gate in Schiphol to identify what KLM customers found most important and why, and how they used the after-sales portal.

The most important topics were:

  1. Finding current trips and their other bookings
  2. Getting relevant notifications
  3. Getting assistance or support when needed
  4. Booking a new trip

I took these insights and designed a new home screen for the after-sales portal in a “North Star” prototype, using the existing AKQA concept designs.

Unfortunately, it never saw daylight because the AirFrance/KLM merger meant that a wholly new portal was necessary. But everyone on the team was very inspired and enthusiastic about the prototype.