Airvel — Patrick Widen

The Problem

Airvel's mission is to democratize private jet travel. While private aviation is traditionally regarded as prohibitively expensive, it becomes more affordable if certain conditions are met. The client needed an experience that made it easy for a user to search for available aircraft between two destinations, create/personalize a trip and galvanize friends or family to share the cost of the experience. Think "Venmo for Private Jets."

It was this description alongside a host of primary and secondary user and competitive research that formed the foundation for the user experience and user interface I created for Airvel.

Limitations / Constraints

As a startup, the client had an aggressive timeframe, limited budget and desire to migrate their existing technology stack to a more modern one.

The solution needed to allow the company to go to market, test the product's viability and gather data to excite and evangelize stakeholders--in this case, primarily investors, potential users and operators of private aircraft.

Process

The project began with a series of stakeholder meetings comprised of the client's founding executive team, marketing team and engineering resources contracted to build the product.

Then, in parallel, I gathered and organized a combination of the client's research and my own to ensure familiarity with the space, current and future competitive analysis, existing experiences and inspiration from across other travel and luxury digital experiences.

Below, you'll find a static snapshot of current/possible competitors exported from one of my favorite design tools, Mural.

Alongside ensuring I understood the competitive landscape in Airvel's industry, I also scoured the web for inspiration derived from great user experiences across the travel industry (like AirBnb) and compiled them into an interactive whiteboard (again, with Mural). I organized a collection of ideas for how we might create the optimal experience for Airvel's users (some from research others from the client and many my own), which became a dynamic springboard for us to review in weekly client presentations and brainstorming sessions.

UX Research From Other Digital Travel Experiences

From there, I built a dynamic journey map in concert with the client and subdivided it into screens/places, programmatic actions/triggers, actions taken by the primary user, actions by other users and external events that would not be captured in the user experience we were focused on.

There's an export of the latest iteration of this map below.

I also developed a more visual version of our Journey Map that I updated in concert with the interface itself. You'll find an iteration of it below (with medium-fidelity concepts).

Tons of sketches flowed throughout the project, capturing and conceptualizing every phase of the experience in an iterative fashion until we arrived at things we wanted to test.

A dynamic clickable prototype (updated daily) featuring medium and high fidelity screens was created first in InVision then later in Adobe XD and tested by the client, stakeholders and potential users. Feedback from all three was captured in real time using the softwares' commenting features. With it, the design was iterated on and presented or tested against both business requirements and real users.

Solution(s):

I delivered an end-to-end user experience encompassing search, requesting an aircraft, creating a trip, personalizing a trip, payments, inviting friends and family and dynamic itineraries with all pertinent details for a user's trip.

Early on in the discovery phase of the project, it became clear that Airvel's brand promise of democratized private jet travel only works given certain circumstances that fall within a particular number of passengers, distance and aircraft type. As a result, I delivered two unique core search experiences with this in mind.

The first experience was designed to mirror functionality found on most travel/aircraft booking sites since users have certain expectations and experiences in mind when visiting a travel site.

A snapshot of part of this concept for the Airvel search experience is shown below.

Refined Booking Experience After Several Iterations

I also delivered a second concept, informed by the critical importance of three variables in ensuring Airvel's results matched its promise of affordable private aviation: passengers, distance and aircraft type. Using the user's point of origin as a starting point, the interface presents possible destinations that conform to ideal values for these parameters--ensuring the brand's promise is front and center.

The Airvel Explore interface (shown below) highlights the user's departure location on a map and draws a radius of 400mi around them (a data point given to me by Airvel). Possible destinations appear as red location markers on the map and alongside the map on the lefthand side. Users have an option to limit the search to major cities or can optionally uncheck a box to show lesser known destinations.

Users can modify the type of aircraft, the number of passengers and the budget he or she has to spend per seat--all of which update the user's possible destinations in real time.

Users are given a unique, customizable "Trip Page" that they can use to invite friends and family to join in the adventure. The Trip Page becomes the command center for the rest of the experience and evolves into an itinerary after all of the seats are filled.

For the initiator of the trip, a dashboard encompassing invitations with status indicators, trip settings and options for personalization can be revealed from the right side of the screen.

The snapshots shown above are a glimpse at the user experience I created for Airvel's first MVP. Soon, I'll iterate on it and begin to further develop ideas and concepts that we pushed to the next version (like this one below, a brand page that aggregates possible trips for organizations).

Multiple Trips By Groups