Challenge/Opportunity

Emirates Skywards, the airline’s frequent flyer program, lived on a separate domain at skywards.com. We were asked to merge the standalone Skywards site back into the larger Emirates.com experience and redesign it, ending a siloed user experience that limited the airline’s ability to learn about its customers as well as drive loyalty and revenue. In our new design, we also had to consider a Skywards team’s mandate to collect as much information about their members as possible.

Process

Following a rigorous analysis of site analytics and customer survey data, we created a completely new content strategy and site architecture, resulting in a dashboard that surfaced the most important content. The project required a large amount of travel to the client in Dubai. On these 12+ hour flights, we gained an additional insight through impromptu interviews with the flight crew. We learned that both passengers and crew both had a difficult time understanding the differences between the 2 types of Skywards Miles (one is the currency you can buy tickets with, the other determines your status on the airline). This created an additional opportunity to deliver the best possible experience. For the mandate regarding customer data, we scoured social networks looking for best practices in profile completion.

Result

We successfully merged the 2 sites together, resulting in a 38% increase in logins, their most important KPI. The experience also created a clear differentiation between Skywards and Tier Miles, with a progress indicator to show the customer how far they need to fly to earn status on the airline.

Additionally, we created a “dynamic action box” at the top of the dashboard. At first, this section would contain a profile completion widget, inspired by LinkedIn, allowing the Skywards team to build robust customer profiles. Once the user had competed their full profile, the Emirates team could repurpose this section to drive customer action toward other initiatives, such as connecting a Facebook account to their login.