LoungeBuddy for iPhone 3.0
Defining the future of the digital airport experience.
LoungeBuddy for iPhone enables travelers to discover and access the different airport experiences (lounges, hotels, restaurants, etc) available to them though their Airline Status, Lounge Memberships, Credit Cards, and more. After seven years, we made the choice to rethink our mobile product from the ground up to take full advantage of SwiftUI and to use the knowledge we've gathered over the years to deliver a truly modern experience to our users.
The Research
What did we do over the course of three months? We audited the legacy app to determine what worked and what could be improved, analyzed user behavior in Localytics, analyzed reviews from the App Store, looked at our competition, ran an in-app survey and analyzed over 100 responses, conducted 14 usability tests with the current app and 22 exploratory user interviews with both users and non-users of our products.
We conducted an extensive research project from April - June 2019 to learn about the ecosystem of tools we were a part of, how people make decisions while traveling, what they use to research lounges, and their impression of our product. In doing so, we learned a lot of valuable lessons:
- People wanted our app to be more intuitive. Our UI was confusing and we needed to reduce the friction of using our product by helping them find the right experience.
- We had an engagement problem with our app; only 28% of users had an access method recorded and only 3.5% of users created a trip.
- We had two different types of users: (1) those who care about optimizing their experience at the airport, and (2) those who only use our products when they have spare time at the airport.
The Traveler's Journey
Despite having two types of users, both types of travelers think similarly about how they choose to spend their time at the airport. This includes their Access Methods (is it free or do they have to pay), their departure gate location, how much time they have before their flight, the overall context of their trip (i.e. business vs leisure), and what amenities they are looking for (i.e. food, shower, internet, etc.).
Our Goals
Our primary goal was to create a foundation for future innovation by streamlining the competing flows in our legacy product and increasing engagement across two specific data points:
- Access Methods: Increasing the number of users who record access methods (airline statuses, lounge memberships, credit cards, etc.) in our mobile app.
- Flight Details: Increasing the number of trips created in the app that have flight details.
We chose these two data points because we knew from our research that travelers that provide this information are more likely to find value in our products, and therefore engage with other features (like uploading photos or submitting reviews).
The New App
I hope the following gallery showcases the extent of this project, and that I have the opportunity to share how we arrived at certain design decisions and some of the iterations along the way.
What's next?
As of this write-up, LoungeBuddy 3.0 has been in the App Store for ~2 weeks, and we have some pretty interesting insights that will inform what's next for the product:
- 18% of users who updated to LoungeBuddy 3.0 (who did not previously add an access method in our legacy product), added one during the onboarding flow.
- LoungeBuddy 2.0 converted users to view an airport 25% better than LoungeBuddy 3.0, but LoungeBuddy 3.0 converts users 12% better to view a lounge. The primary reason for this is that we removed the ability to search for an airport without entering your flight details, but it's an important metric to track.
- Our most common feedback from users who updated from LoungeBuddy 2.0 is that they don't want to create a trip. We knew this would be the case when we removed the search functionality, and are discussing different ways to address this feedback.
- Perhaps most interestingly, new users are actually less likely to create a trip than users who updated from LoungeBuddy 2.0. This indicates that we are not communicating the full value of creating a trip, especially on first use of the app.
Team Breakdown: LoungeBuddy 3.0 was built in its entirety (from concept to shipping to the App Store) in about 18 months. You might be surprised to hear that the entire team included two designers, one product manager, and two iOS engineers (with support from the platforms team, customer support, data, and operations). It was a massive team effort, and I couldn't be more proud of what we accomplished together!
Completed February 2021
