UltraBasic and Extended Comfort
Designing strategic user experiences for the launch of two product offerings.
Overview
WestJet launched a new fare and a new seat type at the same time. We designed the digital experience from booking to the mobile app in six months, coordinating across more than 100 employees.
I led the design of the end-to-end experience. We created three design principles to align everyone working on the project, and to move fast, we grounded decisions in guest sentiment research, user testing, and A/B tests rather than opinion.
We delivered the end-to-end digital experience and product strategy, creating over 50 features across six products. UX decisions saved the company millions of dollars and we continue to optimize for revenue.
The stakes
Two products, six months, 100+ people
WestJet launched UltraBasic (UB), a fare with a “no carry-on bag” policy, to ease bag congestion at the gate that often caused flight delays. Alongside it, the business launched Extended Comfort (EC). The new offerings came with their own challenges: confusing fare restrictions, new baggage rules, and price transparency issues. I led the design of the end-to-end digital experience from booking to check-in.
With extremely tight timelines, there were heavy technical constraints on what we would be able to build.
Many stakeholders had strong opinions about what the experience needed to be. There was high risk creating designs that satisfied everyone, but pleased no one.
Baggage allowance changed depending on fare, seat, and route type. Guests needed to understand exactly how many and which type of bags they would bring.
The call
Push through or flag
When the project got to us, we were told to make the UB experience challenging. It should feel like users want to buy up instead of going through that flow. However, design didn’t think framing the fare that way made sense. Instead, we proposed there’s a fare for everyone. This one decision kicked off how we approached the project and aligned everyone on the direction.
Continue with the proposed direction vs. flag it and re-test
A design strategy was already proposed when the project got to our team. The easier path would be to build it as scoped rather than reopen a decision stakeholders had aligned on.
Design direction flagged as there were concerns the proposed solution would be a poor guest experience, and we used data to make the case for changing direction instead.
Pushed back on a direction already in motion, slowing down delivery. However, switching directions avoided an estimated annual loss of $35M in flight revenue and $2M in ancillary revenue.
Understanding guests
What guests value, in the order they value it
To ground our design decisions in user insights, we initiated the discovery phase with comprehensive user research. We conducted two baseline tests: one to gauge guest sentiment towards the current Basic fare experience and another to identify the attributes guests valued most.
These insights informed both the design and the communication strategy, ensuring that we addressed the existing pain points while creating a more intuitive and guest-friendly experience.
Guests appreciated the simplicity of the current booking flow but often found the fare rules unclear. Key pain points included difficulty in understanding baggage policies and frustration with inconsistent experiences across platforms.
Top general categories were change/cancel, baggage, and then seat selection. To meet operational goals, we swapped the order of change/cancel with baggage. When upgrading, guests cared most about getting extra legroom.
Principles
Three principles, 50+ features
To align with WestJet’s business strategy and deliver a user-centred experience, we established three key design principles. These principles guided the development of over 50 features across six products:
Principle 1
Upselling where it matters
Understanding that UB guests are highly price-sensitive, we strategically placed upsell opportunities at key decision points to maximize impact and assist guests in making informed choices without feeling overwhelmed.
Principle 2
Guest education
To support operational goals, we prioritized clear, repeated communication of fare rules and baggage allowances — reinforcing what guests had bought and reducing the confusion that was driving calls to frontline and call-centre staff.
Principle 3
Consistency across every touchpoint
As the only team overseeing the guest journey end-to-end, we treated look and feel, interactions, and information as one connected system — extending past digital screens to the airport and in-flight experience, so guests got the same story everywhere and the contact centre took less of the load.
One story everywhere
The same message from booking to boarding
Booking
Manage Trips
Emails
Check-in
Mobile app
Results
Optimizing after launch
Experience A
Experience B
Experience A
Experience B
~5%lift in Economy buy-up from updated design patterns
Did the new patterns pay off?
Post-launch testing backed up the refreshed flows. Updated design patterns lifted Economy buy-up by almost 5%, adding over $3M in flight revenue and $400K in ancillary revenue.
Impact and takeaways
Our refreshed design flows helped guests easily understand the product offerings, select the ancillaries they valued, and pay only for what they truly needed. On top of the revenue from post-launch testing was the $35M and $2M in losses avoided by pushing back on a weaker proposed direction. The result was a launch that welcomed price-sensitive guests without leaving revenue on the table. We now see an average of 15k bookings for UB daily.
Leading a team
This was my first time leading a team of all contractors. It was chaotic at the start, onboarding everyone to understand complex products. Of the six months, we spent the first one deep diving into different products, understanding the opportunities and constraints. Taking full ownership of design also meant providing good feedback to the design team, ensuring that we aligned with existing standards. Through all this, I learned how to manage, organize, and prioritize design requirements to keep the team on track and on time.
Design debt and streamlining process
This project was the largest initiative we undertook since switching to Figma. The scale and scope posed challenges, such as Figma files becoming too large to load and Zeplin being difficult to navigate. To overcome these obstacles, we established a source of truth file for product owners to reference, created an archival system for managing design iterations, and optimized component creation. We organized pages to make them easily navigable by all team members, ensuring efficiency and clarity throughout the design process.
Stakeholder management
With the scale of the project, there were many stakeholders to juggle. From individual Product Owners to VPs, everyone had wants and needs, and strong ones. I had two major takeaways from this process — be empowered to flag concerns and speak the stakeholders’ language. With so many questions about the offerings, I ran a workshop with key stakeholders to do a Q&A. This ended up being a major help and further aligned the team in our vision. When presenting designs to VPs, speaking in terms of capturing revenue, improving operations and mitigating negative brand reception sped up our approvals as leadership understood our thinking.