The Product
easyJet is the leading European low-cost airline, that offers a unique and affordable combination of the best route network connecting Europe's primary airports, with great value fares.
The Problem
Compared to their UX strategy that focuses on the external audience (focus on delivering a great user journey to encourage customers to book flights), the focus on internal users (management & administration, crew and pilots, engineering) is overlooked. As the crew members and staff are the heart of the business, they need to always have their training up-to-date in order to be allowed to fly and assure customers' safety and follow the strict airline regulations. The learning and development internal platform where they can access the necessary training to achieve that is extremely difficult to navigate, clunky and unorganised. and it is not up to date. This creates challenges for the staff to complete their training and acquire their certificates on time. At the same time, it creates a bad experience for the course creators that need to upload and organise the training materials on the site.
The Goals
-
Create a better learning & development experience for crew members and all staff
-
Create an intuitive user journey from logging into the platform to booking a course and completing it
-
Increase user engagement with the platform and improve the look&feel (not just focusing on the mandatory learning but on the other personal development training opportunities)
-
Create more visual assets: home page, learning dashboard, mandatory leaning dashboard, find learning page
The Design Process
I've started the design process with the analysis of the current platform by organising a focus group to collect feedback and identify the challenges, limitations and pain points of the users. Based on the feedback received and the business requirements and vision from the stakeholders, I’ve started to map out the navigation structure and the number of pages that needed to be created. Due to the tight release date deadline, I have started building the hi-fi designs, skipping the wireframing process. Then the testing team has used the prototype in their usability testing, where various people within the business have been given different testing user scripts to follow to test the prototype. The feedback received was positive from the platform's look&feel perspective to the the general usability and user flows. As the platform is sourced by a third party provider, and not internally developed, some of the technical limitations of user flows and and front-end customisations, had to be flagged and requests have been raised to the provider to find solutions as it affects the user experience.
Discovery research - focus groups
I have organised 3 small focus groups with the representatives from each audience (management&administration, crew&pilots and engineering) to discuss their experience while using the platform, challenges and limitations as well as points to consider and potential improvements.
Below are a few sample questions used during the sessions:
-
What do you think about the current Online Learning Academy platform?
-
On what occasion or for what reasons you are using the platform most often?
-
What do you like about the current platform?
-
What do you think can be improved on the current platform?
-
From a UX perspective, do you think the current platform meets the standard criteria?
Takeaways
-
The current platform is mostly accessed by the users to complete their mandatory training and other compulsory refresher training that need to be kept up-to-date for their jobs
-
The current platform is difficult to navigate and not intuitive for both overall users and admins.
-
The look&feel of the platform is off and a bit too old-fashioned as does not reflect the easyJet brand as much
-
The platform is clunky and disorganised (quite difficult to find your way around it and access other things than mandatory training).
User Persona
User Flow: Book a course / self-enrollment
User Flow: Check learning progress
User Interface
Log in page
Find learning - course library
Course info page
Homepage
My learning dashboard
Course booked-success
Prototype - Find learning (development site)
Prototype - Learning progress (development site)
Usability testing
I have conducted UAT testing with the testing team, reviewing the scripts and tasks. We have ran company -wide testing based on each audience (around 10 to 15). The usability testing sessions were moderated remotely using the high fidelity prototype built on the development site. The users were asked to complete the following tasks:
First task
-
On the homepage, identify all the card sections you can see
-
From the home page, go to find learning and browse the course catalog from the navigation menu or the card below
-
Once landed on the find learning, use the filters to find a course
-
Once you find a course, try to book into that course
Second task
-
On the homepage, identify all the card sections you can see
-
From the navigation menu at the top or the cards below, click on 'My learning' and then My learning dashboard
-
Check all of the statuses for the courses and see on which ones you have courses showing up
-
Check the 'started' status, and click on one of the courses to see if it shows you the course information and you can continue the course
-
Go back to your learning dashboard and from the top, check your mandatory learning dashboard too
After the tasks were completed, I asked each user to provide feedback in terms of their experience in using the prototype. The purpose was to allow me to assess the usability of the prototype. Below are the set of questions asked:
-
What is your overall opinion about the product and site?
-
What did you like most about using the product/site?
-
What did you like least about using the product/site?
-
What do you think can be improved?
-
Did you feel lost/get stuck while doing the tasks?
Answers:
-
I felt this was a much better experience compared to what we had previously. I think the course catalog page makes such a big difference in the sense that I can actually look for more courses, rather than just the mandatory ones assigned by the company
-
It's so much easier to book a course now and I love the fact that now there is a mandatory learning dashboard so I can keep track of what courses are due
-
I think it's still a bit limited as the vendor and how it is built in the backend does not let use much freedom on some cases. However, in terms of the look&feel and the user journey and flow, it's a big improvement.
Measuring Success
Below are a few tactics/metrics applied to measure the success of this product upgrade release:
1. Monitor the number of site visitors on the site.
2. Monitor the number of courses booked by the user on the site.
3. Monitor the views on the product page from the L&D Hub from where users can access the platform
4. Monitor the number of cases/enquiries raised by the users related to issues they experienced on the platform.
Conclusion
Overall the project was a success. The feedback we've received post-launch from the users was really good. After the first month, we've got more than 2000 users who have logged in into the platform (which is two times more than usual) and the time spent on site much improved. Also the number of tickets/queries raised have decreased considerably compared to the previous improvement. However, there were a couple of issues that were raised to the provider, as there were not caused by our work but were closely monitored and addresses straightaway to make sure frictions are removed as soon as possible.
