AUI Airlines

Project Motivation

I’ve always been fascinated (and occasionally frustrated) by how rigid traditional flight-booking sites can be. Even as a regular traveler, I would find myself clicking through page after page of forms and irrelevant offers, desperately searching for the route or seat option I actually wanted. That friction not only wastes time for customers but also means more abandoned itineraries and lost revenue for airlines. I saw an opportunity to harness Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) to fundamentally change how we book flights. By learning from each user’s behaviors, preferences, and context over time, AUIs can make flight bookings more intuitive and personalized. Whether you’re the frequent business traveler who values a window seat with no checked bags, or a college student hunting down a last-minute deal, a well-designed AUI should reduce friction instead of adding to it. That’s what this project is all about: moving beyond static, one-size-fits-all booking flows toward a truly individualized travel-planning experience.

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Project Scope

This initiative was a four-week exploration of how airlines, specifically Delta, could implement AUIs to increase user satisfaction and reduce abandoned bookings. We combined detailed user research, concept ideation, low-fidelity mockups, pitch-deck prototypes, and iterative feedback sessions (including critiques from peers and faculty) to refine our approach.

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Key Objectives

1. Increase Booking Completion Rates: By presenting the most relevant flight options and minimizing unnecessary steps.
2. Boost User Satisfaction: Through personalized, contextual notifications and adaptive workflows that cater to each traveler’s unique needs.
3. Improve Delta’s Competitive Edge: In an industry crowded with third-party aggregators, a flexible, adaptive interface can give direct airline sites a compelling reason for travelers to book in-house.
4. Leverage Machine Learning Ethically: We aimed to offer real-time personalization without compromising privacy or overwhelming users with intrusive suggestions.

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Methods and Tools

• User Analysis: We interviewed peers who frequently book flights (business travelers, college students, and holiday flyers) and synthesized their pain points into actionable design goals.
• AUI Concept Development: We compared standard booking flows to the potential of adaptive technologies, drawing on the frameworks we explored in other apps like Venmo, Delta’s existing structure, and Outlook’s contextual AI.
• Prototyping & Feedback Sessions: Using low-fidelity sketches and pitch-deck wireframes, we validated our ideas with critique sessions. This helped us iterate quickly and avoid overcomplicating the design.
• Value Flow Diagrams: We mapped potential benefits for all stakeholders—travelers, customer support teams, and marketing—to ensure a holistic perspective beyond just the end user’s screen.

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My Role and Goals

I served as both a Design Researcher and Product Strategist, as well as the Co-Project Manager, ensuring that our vision remained cohesive while keeping the team aligned on deliverables and deadlines. My key contributions included:

• Co-Project Management
  • Led team coordination efforts, ensuring smooth collaboration and timely completion of milestones.
  • Balanced design iterations with feasibility constraints, keeping our scope realistic while maintaining ambitious goals.
  • Facilitated critique sessions, integrating stakeholder feedback into our iterative design process.
• Synthesizing Insights
  • Conducted interviews and usability walkthroughs to identify major friction points (like repetitive data entry, irrelevant ads, or hidden customer support).
  • Aligned these user pains with Delta’s business objectives, specifically reducing itinerary abandonment.
• Interface Architecture and Wireframing
  • Created initial sketches that emphasized adaptive search suggestions, auto-filled preferences (e.g., seats, baggage, flight times), and dynamic homepage modules.
  • Worked with the team to integrate user feedback into progressively refined designs.
• Pitch Development
  • Crafted the core narratives for our final presentation, focusing on business value (revenue growth, user loyalty) and measurable OKRs (like decreased time to complete a booking).
  • Incorporated key findings from feedback sessions, ensuring our pitch clearly conveyed how AUIs could differentiate Delta from third-party aggregators.

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From Ideation to Final Pitch

Identifying the Problem and Researching AUIs

At the outset, we explored how Delta could benefit from an adaptive approach:

• Rigid “One-Size-Fits-All” Flows: Most current airline sites funnel everyone through the same set of pages. As a result, frequent flyers waste time re-entering details they always choose, and occasional travelers get stuck in endless up-selling.
• Unclear Calls to Action and Support: Hidden customer service links and a cluttered homepage made it cumbersome for users to navigate, especially when they already felt uncertain about flight bookings.

We hypothesized that AUIs could solve these issues by remembering frequent user choices, surfacing relevant deals at the right time, and dynamically adjusting the site’s layout based on each user’s experience level and travel context.

Crafting Our AUI Concepts

Inspired by examples like Google Home’s routine-based prompts and Microsoft Outlook’s contextual replies, we designed features aimed specifically at the airline domain:

• Homepage Personalization: A redesigned landing page that immediately prompts returning users with routes they book often, seat preferences, or unbooked upcoming holiday travel.
• Streamlined Booking Flow: Instead of burying flight details behind multiple screens, we surfaced real-time pricing and seat availability the moment travelers selected a route.
• Contextual Upselling: For frequent flyers, show relevant loyalty or credit card offers only if they match the traveler’s flight behavior. For holiday travelers, highlight timely deals tied to upcoming breaks.

Storyboarding User Personas & Flows

We created three personas—Business Traveler, Frequency Flyer College Student, Holiday Traveler—and mapped how each would move through the interface. By weaving in real user pain points (like the business traveler’s frustration with re-entering the same seat preferences), we validated that an adaptive site could remove repetitive tasks and highlight the most relevant flights first.

Pitch Deck & Critique Sessions

After building low-fidelity wireframes and a simplified pitch deck, we participated in a formal critique. Key takeaways:

• Clarify the Problem: We needed to make the benefit to Delta explicit. In addition to user satisfaction, we emphasized lower abandonment rates and potential for targeted upselling.
• Reduce Clutter: We simplified screens to remove extraneous text and combined multiple steps into a single streamlined page.
• Highlight Contrasts: Showing how a user’s journey looks in a static interface vs. an adaptive interface helped stakeholders see the immediate improvement.

Final Deliverable

We closed the loop by refining our deck and building a final set of annotated wireframes, as well as a high-fidelity Figma prototype, illustrating how each user persona might benefit from real-time personalization. Our proposed adaptive homepage displayed relevant offers and upcoming travel reminders, while the booking funnel auto-filled repeated details and displayed recommended flights at the top based on prior behavior. In short, we strived to make booking a flight feel more akin to a curated experience than a tedious chore.

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The Solution

Augmenting the Flight Booking Experience with AUIs is a proof of concept that merges user-centric design with advanced machine learning. In a nutshell:

1. Personalized Homepage: The moment users log in, they see a short list of flights matching their frequent routes and preferences, special seasonal promotions for known travel periods, plus immediate contact options for easy help.
2. Contextual Booking Flow: Real-time route suggestions are updated as travelers tweak dates or destinations, and seat and baggage choices auto-populate from the user’s profile.
3. Targeted Upsell Opportunities: Instead of spammy banners, dynamic offers only appear when they make sense (e.g., an upgrade to premium economy if user data shows a preference for extra legroom).
4. Performance Tracking & ROI: Delta can measure the direct impact of these adaptive elements through metrics like reduced booking time, increased seat upgrades, and fewer abandoned carts.

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Honed Skills

• Adaptive UI Design: Enhanced my ability to build interfaces that morph around user context and data, rather than forcing a static flow on all.
• User-Centered Iteration: Deepened my approach to continuous feedback loops, ensuring that every design pivot was grounded in actual user or stakeholder feedback.
• Balancing Business and User Needs: Strengthened my capacity to align corporate revenue goals (reducing third-party aggregator reliance) with user-friendly interfaces (auto-filled forms, personalized deals).
• Pitch and Presentation: Became more adept at demonstrating value through direct comparisons, showing exactly how an adaptive flow differs from a static one in both visuals and user outcomes.

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Conclusion

This project revealed that airlines have a massive untapped opportunity to transform stale, static booking flows into experiences that feel genuinely tailored, much like a streaming service recommending your next favorite show. By using machine learning to pre-fill flight details, highlight relevant loyalty perks, and adapt the booking flow in real time, we could spare travelers the tedium of re-entering the same information and rummaging through irrelevant extras. Moving forward, I’m excited about the broader implications of AUIs for industries that historically rely on rigid, multi-step processes, from healthcare sign-ups to college admissions. With the right mix of thoughtful design and adaptive tech, we can finally put user preferences at the center of each interaction, ensuring that the journey feels efficient, intuitive, and maybe even a little fun.