ibm&aircanada

Problem

Survey results and backend data show that:

Goal

As part of the content team, our goal was to reimagine navigation.
To find specific content for users and to increase personalization and convenience factors. Focusing on menus/local navigation, we set ourselves a few goals to keep in mind:

Flexible Search
Upsell
Make Info Easily Discoverable

Users

Air Canada has a relatively fixed audience, which can be largely represented by the few personas below.
For our content navigation-specific needs, we decided to set our focus on Maria, a busy working mom planning a family trip; she'll be our main character for the story today :)

We split her actions and JTBD into a few phases:

Pre-Booking: Maria notices a Disneyland trip discount sent to her email but could not find it after, she attempts to find it on AC's official website
During-Booking: After failing to find the discount due to frustration in content navigation, she proceeds to the booking page, hoping to find it during the booking process and maybe some other perks along with it
Post Booking: After completing her booking, Maria would like to verify all her benefits have been applied to her trip
Day of Travel: Maria and her family are ready to go and would like a streamlined check-in process

User Journey Map

To help sort things out a bit more, I organized out a user journey map template sorted by phases shown before. First we analyzed users actions and steps, as well as their main touch points. From there on, we were then able to identify pain points and challenges that we had to solve.

Pain Points

Competitive Analysis

Across the industry, top navigation is used in conjunction with booking-related links commonly attached to the booking magnet.
We have what is more common as "booking magnets" in our sidebar, while most of the navigation in our sidebar is grouped under "more."

As more links have been added to the side bar, other links, such as "more" have been pushed further down to the point that they are hidden from view at the default launch of the home page.
Many airlines use “Travel Info” as their general heading for what AC calls “Plan” on the Legacy navigation.

Brainstorm

Affinity Mapping:

We decided on two possible solutions:

Heres some of my scrap ideas for "Search"

Solution

Navigation

The updated navigation moves content of greater hierarchy from the side navigation bar to the top navigation bar

Aeroplan Offers and eStore condensed and placed within the Aeroplan menu at the top navigation bar

before

after

Search Reimagined

Top search bar remains in the same location but made more distinguishable

Search now incorporate personalized search results, predicting and reminding what the user needs

"Sources" provide the user with the chance to learn more about content useful to them, encouraging exploration

before

after

Test Plan

Test plans were developed for each of the two solutions by breaking down the purpose, objective, roles, type of participants, and the tasks participants are required to take action on. These test plans were planned to be conducted in Maze. Below is the test plan for the navigation bar, involving 1 task for the user to complete:

Below is the test plan for the new search function, involving 3 tasks for the user to complete

System usability scale (SUS) questions for them to answer:

What do you think about the search tool?
What was your favourite feature?
What was your least favourite feature?

Next Steps

The next step would primarily be to start the usability testing on Maze. With the findings from the data gathered, a new prototype mockup will be built, implanting any feedback received from users.

Navigation with Air Canada