Etch

For customers, travelling with British Airways is a smooth experience. However, behind the scenes, hundreds of operations must work seamlessly to ensure planes depart, fly and arrive at their destinations on time. From snow and ice, to resource shortages and knock-on delays, unforeseen complications can cause major disruptions to any airline.

We worked with British Airways to develop an operational dashboard. The tool needed to be data-driven to enable BA's staff to predict and manage disruptions, and provide a high-level view of the airline’s entire operations. The goal was to provide a one-stop source of information for every department across the Heathrow operation.

We started the project by spending the first two weeks learning. We listened in on some meetings, we wrote down all the acronyms that we didn't understand and we read the FT and many academic papers. The development of the dashboard was user-focused and user-driven. We began by questioning the people who would be using it in order to understand their needs. We worked across five departments and numerous stakeholders, running workshops to identify the requirements of the dashboard. As ideas emerged, we began sketching and wireframing to demonstrate how this tool would work.

The result was a data-driven dashboard displaying information from across BA’s operations. The dashboard shows high-level, operational information – almost in real-time – and presents complex data in an intuitive way. Users can then go deeper in each department, accessing detailed information on airline performance. The dashboard is now used by a variety of people in different contexts, from big screens in the control tower to customer attendants' iPads as they travel between terminals. It was built responsively, ensuring all data displays perfectly whatever device it’s viewed on. BA’s staff can easily access the data they need at any time on the dashboard.

Old Mutual Wealth already offered their customers and financial advisers space online to manage their investments, but came to us to see how they could benefit from applying the latest digital innovations and design thinking to be confident they were delivering a first-class experience online.

Talking with groups of customers and advisers about how they used the current platform informed us of the areas which were working well, the pain points that could be improved as well as the most frequent actions performed online.

A project of this scale would only be successful through collaboration with multiple teams, across multiple disciplines. We worked closely with Old Mutual Wealth to integrate our design thinking alongside the technical capabilities of the development team to create a set of design principles which could be applied to all the required screen templates. Key customer journeys were split into design sprints, allowing the teams to use an Agile methodology which built-in the process of continued learning and iteration as the sprints progressed.

Our approach allowed us to identify the user needs, apply and test our designs with customers and advisers, iterate on our ideas as we progressed and finally create a set of UX principles which the development team could apply throughout all Old Mutual Wealth’s digital services. The new layouts and standards gave the flexibility to increase the range of services Old Mutual Wealth offered online as well as allowing all processes to work fluidly across screen sizes, devices and platforms. The new interface and features launched in 2018.