A New Approach to Flight Shopping
By: Mollie Bates
Tags: Travel, Startup, Customer Experience, Usability Testing, Product Design

Last month, Upside Business Travel made a small update to our flight shopping experience: we changed the fare grid column headers from stars to seat icons with words. The simple change culminates a year of work at Upside, as we participated in the ATPCO Next Generation Storefront (NGS) working group.

Upside’s Next Generation Storefront design with seat icons, November 2019

The Upside product delivery team works to balance customer and business needs for our flight shopping experience:

Customer need (desirability): to easily find, compare and select the best flight and fare for their business trip

to easily find, compare and select the best flight and fare for their business trip Business need (viability): to allow for airlines to differentiate their products on our site, and to participate in ATPCO NGS working group.

Of course, technical feasibility (can we build it?) was considered, but I’ll leave those considerations for an engineering team blog post.

A primer: ATPCO is an industry organization owned by airlines that provides “technology, pricing, and shopping data to airlines, global distribution systems, travel agencies, and tech companies”. According to ATPCO: “The Next Generation Storefront (NGS)™ is a set of data standards that enable distribution channels to better present, sort, and find the airline products and services consumers are looking for.”

For non-industry folks: the NGS allows customers to compare fare classes (seat, amenities, rules) on different airlines in standardized columns representing similar experiences. Airlines now have a variety of branded fare offerings within cabins, each with different names, which makes them hard to compare. For example, for a flight from JFK to LAX, the grid solution lines up JetBlue Mint, American Flagship Business, and Delta One under the fifth column, since they all have lie-flat seats. This gets more complex as you add in airlines that offer only one cabin (Southwest), or budget airlines that offer limited service (Spirit).

Before the ATPCO working group kicked off, I was designing for flight fare class selection after the customer chose the airline and time, like the experience on Kayak or Priceline. We prioritized this work because customers compared our economy fare prices to other sites showing basic economy fares. Our research showed that business travelers likely don’t want to buy basic economy fares, but they had a negative impression of our pricing when comparing apples to oranges.

Concept for fare class selection after choosing the flight (never built), Fall 2018

As we were working through this design, ATPCO announced the NGS effort in October 2018. We joined ATPCO’s NGS working group in January 2019 and began to learn the requirements of the new storefront. Simply put, ATPCO defined the six star shelves based on available legroom and baggage or cancellation restrictions. A one-star fare represents a basic economy fare in the economy cabin, with a two-star fare aligning with standard economy fare and cabin, and fancier seats with more legroom going up from there, all the way to a six-star semi-private pod.

While our engineering team worked on pulling in the proper data to display the fares in a grid, I began to design the flight grid display and explore how customers would respond to the new concept. In early January, I conducted usability tests on a prototype with five customers and ten non-customers to validate the design. I was skeptical of the fare grid and star labeling — my gut and experience told me it would overload customers with too much information.

Prototype for Next Generation Storefront usability testing, January 2019

Much to my surprise, 100% of users reacted positively to seeing the range of each flight’s fares displayed in a grid against other airline offerings. Several users mentioned that the new design would open them up to thinking about the value of different fare classes:

“I’ve never really thought about this when booking flights. I just go with the cheapest option, or less stops. This helps change my perspective a little bit — [if I choose a higher fare class] I’m getting a lot more in value for what I’m spending.”

Users reacted with confusion to the star ratings topping each column. They made broad generalizations aligning the stars to cabin class or price, rather than the specific criteria used to define the star levels. Some mistook the stars for user reviews, upon which they expressed mistrust. We also asked about hotel star ratings, and found that many users either don’t understand or don’t trust that long-standing system.

Based on this user research, we shipped a new flight design in early March with the flight grid, but without any labels or stars on top of the columns. We knew it would not be the final solution; our team was still participating in the ATPCO working group meetings and the standard was not finalized. Over the next six weeks, the business need to be collaborative partners in the ATPCO working group trumped the customer need demonstrated by our research, so we added the star labels into our flight display. Product delivery is always a push and pull between desirability, viability, and feasibility — in this case business viability pulled hardest.

With our solution released to production, I conducted another round of usability tests, this time with 10 non-customers. These users told us that they care most about flight time, number of stops, and price. Half felt that they needed no more information to choose a flight and fare, and after being prompted to explore the additional information, all users stayed with their original choice. They restated the learnings from the first round: the price grid was useful for finding opportunities to move to a higher fare for a small cost. Again, they generalized the definition of the stars based on price and cabin class, which is not an accurate description of the star shelf requirements.

At the same time, we now had data from product use: the fare grid increased premium bookings (higher than 2-star fare classes) by 62%. We didn’t hear customer-initiated feedback about the stars; my guess is that most customers glazed over them.

Upside Product Manager, Emma Giberson, shared the user research results with the ATPCO working group at the July meeting in London. With stars live on many competitor’s sites and feedback flowing to the working group, the winds shifted and ATPCO announced that they “struck” the stars from the NGS standard in early September.

A new product designer assigned to the flight team, Sabrina Ritacco, designed new non-star options for the column toppers, and tested the options with users. Users preferred our customer-designed seat icons with words over stars, though some still showed confusion over the column designations. We’ve gone live with the icons and look forward to continuing to gather customer feedback about the design.

Though it was difficult to ship the star solution that confused customers, I’m pleased that ATPCO gathered customer feedback from the working group and changed the standard. With the new storefront, Upside customers see the full range of fares offered by different airlines, and can find opportunities for a better flight experience. What do you think of the new design — will it help you easily find, compare and select the best flight and fare for your business trip? Leave your feedback below!

Related: watch Upside’s Director of Supplier Relations, Hillary Yale, speak about the NGS at ATPCO’s Elevate conference

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