Client_ Southwest Airlines | Ogilvy
Collaboration_ Megan Meza, Maria Reyes-Gaskin
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Client brief_
Southwest Airlines (SWA) is a beloved American brand that was the world’s first low-cost airline, uniquely positioned as offering an elevated experience at a low cost. However, over the last few years they have struggled to stay relevant with customers in the face of newer carriers such as Virgin America and JetBlue.
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We were asked to help SWA develop a personalization roadmap and enhance their app experience.
I worked as senior experience strategist on this client project to do a full audience segmentation and experience strategy that informed the design and functionality of the SWA app.
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Strategic approach to personalization_
To complete a strategic arsenal of customer insight tools, we first started by using SWA's travel data to develop an audience segmentation, personas and customer journeys.
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Engagement strategy and blueprints_
We synthesize insights from previous stages to find key areas to win, for the brand and product. Using our engagement strategies for each audience, we developed 10 engagement opportunities that consist of the best moments, need states and channels to implement the ideas.
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ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Like coal, it’s a raw input that has the potential to be turned into something beautiful
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ENGAGEMENT IDEAS
These are the diamonds, the creative outputs that can activate against challenges identified in the Engagement Opportunity. These can be creative ideas big or small.
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Design a value framework_
To execute our engagement strategy we developed a strategic framework to serve as guardrails during out ideation process. To do this, we defined different forms of value for SWA and identified the core tenants of a good customer experience that our app feature must deliver.
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Client workshop_
I led the team along with our clients through a series of ideation exercises. After generating ideas and combining various insights, we used our value framework to prioritize features to refine our leading ideas and design our MVP.
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Prototyping sprints_
We began sketching and created a paper prototype that we tested with people around the Ogilvy offices.
Our original design had our booking feature focus on helping people make status, but we quickly learned people care more about knowing where they have flown. This iterative process from paper to digital, tweaking which features were highlighted where went on for 3 weeks, until we got to our MVP.
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