• Client: Emirates Airline
• Agency: Atmosphere Proximity
• July 2012 – March 2014

Challenge

Emirates Airline came to us with the opportunity to fully redesign their mobile web experience. At that time, their existing mobile site had a dated, cumbersome interface that required too many steps to accomplish key actions, such as booking a flight. Additionally, the site experience had to work in 18 Languages, including long languages such as Russian and right to left languages like Arabic. To add complexity to the problem, these languages were spoken in 62 Countries, including many with slow or limited cellular connectivity. Adding to the challenge was the design for a seat selector for the Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world.

Process

For the first step, we examined page size and average load times on the key user journeys in order to find the bottlenecks. We then created new storyboards mapped to an updated user journey that reduced the number of steps a user took to move through the experience. Studies had shown that reducing time to completion was critical to increased bookings. For the seat selector, we built on the best ideas from ticketing flows of concert and sporting venue apps.

Once we had a first round of designs, we created a prototype in Axure and did in-person moderated tests in New York, then redesigned the elements of the experience based around that feedback.

Result

We designed the new site with a minimal interface devoid of heavy imagery, relying on CSS for many of the visual elements in order to bring down average page size, and in turn, page load times. From a design perspective, these decisions resulted in an experience that looks and feels more like a native app than a mobile website. Additionally, we reduced the number of steps to complete critical tasks, in some cases as much as half, resulting in a net increase across all relevant metrics, including bookings and revenue.