Airport Guide
A dynamic, context-aware product that prioritizes information in real time to guide customers through their airport journey.
01 - Overview
A high-priority moment, designed for time pressure.
Connecting between flights is one of the most time-sensitive moments in air travel. Customers must quickly interpret gate changes, walking distance, and boarding status—often with little clarity on what to do next.
I led design for the Airport Guide experience, a dynamic, context-aware product that prioritizes information in real time to guide customers through their airport journey.
Missed connections drive operational cost (rebooking, vouchers, lost revenue) and degrade the customer experience—making this a high-priority initiative.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Timeline
Nov 2025 – Present (MVP launching Q2 2026)
Team
Product, engineering, Atrius (mapping), design system
02 - context
The problem isn't a lack of information.
It’s a lack of prioritization under time pressure.
Fragmented across apps, signage, and agents
Customers rely on multiple sources to answer: Where do I go? Will I make my flight? What should I do if something changes? The result is stress, last-minute decisions, and heavy reliance on staff.
End-to-end experience design
Partnered with product and engineering to define product direction, IA, and roadmap. Owned experience design, research, and interaction patterns. Influenced product direction, roadmap, cross-product patterns, and design system adoption.
From sessions to screens
Before any wireframes, we grounded the work in real customer experience. The team participated in competitor connection experiences firsthand, then built journey maps around a customer traveling internationally with a family — complex, high-stakes, and representative of the hardest version of the problem.
The original design established the core layout, initial information hierarchy, and the backend framework and contracts that would underpin the entire experience — the baseline the team pressure-tested before any redesign work began.
Before any frames were touched, a design studio session with the UX principal, app principal, and design manager re-established information architecture from the ground up. Rough sketches surfaced competing assumptions early, resolving them at low cost before moving into structured wireframes.
Wireframes were elevated into presentation-ready concepts for directors, tech leads, and architects. The goal was directional alignment — locking scope and structure so hi-fidelity work could move without revisiting foundational decisions.
Mapping what mattered
With stakeholders, we walked through each phase of the journey and surfaced opportunities. An importance difficulty matrix helped sequence what belonged in MVP and what to defer.
Building toward alignment
Wireframing started on paper, moved to FigJam to align product and engineering, then progress to hi-fidelity once direction was locked. Discovery research ran in parallel — informing architecture decisions before the design got too far ahead.
What research told us
100 participants (UserZoom, mixed methods) showed the issue wasn’t lack of information—it was lack of prioritization under time pressure.
64%
feel concerned before boarding even starts at a 20-minute walk
70%
rank walking-time-to-gate in their top 5 needs during a 30-min connection — vs 58% at 90 min.
87%
want a notification the moment their inbound flight is delayed — 23pts above any other trigger.
85%
want alternate flights surfaced first after a missed connection; 18% will always prefer an agent.
This is a dynamic, context-aware environment, not a linear flow.
03 — Framing & Strategy
The right information, at the right moment.
The goal isn’t to provide more information — it’s to prioritize the right information at the right moment.
Principles
Prioritize for urgency
Time-pressured states surface what’s actionable now; everything else recedes.
Reduce cognitive load
Fewer competing signals. One clear next step at any given moment.
Enable immediate action
Navigation and nearby amenities are always one tap away.
Design for variability
Trips differ in tightness, complexity, and stakes. The system must flex.
Urgency = walking time ÷ remaining boarding time
Exploration features visible
Time emphasized · suggestions in-route
Navigation = primary · noise removed
From connection to whole journey
While MVP focuses on connections, the system was designed to scale across the full journey — from departure (security, bag drop) to arrival (baggage claim, exit).
04 — Decisions & Tradeoffs
Hard calls that made the experience simpler.
Each decision traded one kind of complexity for another. We optimized for customer clarity, not system simplicity.
Inspiration imagery
Removed imagery to reduce noise in high-stress scenarios. Applied it to other products instead.
Geolocation tracker
Real-time location tracking required infrastructure not yet available at MVP. Scoped for second iteration in Q4 2026.
Multi-flight navigation
Tested nested selectors but users lost context. Anchored to the selected flight, prioritizing clarity over completeness.
05 — Solution
A dynamic, context-aware experience.
It surfaces the right information at the right time.
Flight status, gate assignments, boarding times, and time-to-gate all update automatically on a built-in refresh cycle. Geolocation drives the progress tracker, so the estimated time reflects where the customer actually is — not just a static calculation. The section is fully dynamic, meaning layout and content respond to changing flight states without manual intervention.
The map isn't just a thumbnail — customers can pan and explore without launching the full navigation experience. Below it, a step-by-step route list surfaces the things that matter most: terminal transfers, required shuttles or buses, level changes. Airports like DCA that require a bus connection get explicit callouts so customers aren't caught off guard mid-connection.
Significant routing requirements — security rechecks, terminal transfers, shuttles, level changes — are called out explicitly rather than buried in the step list. These surface contextually based on the customer's specific route, keeping the experience relevant without adding noise for straightforward gate-to-gate connections.
What's shown in the amenities section isn't a static airport directory — it's filtered by time of day and journey stage. Morning surfaces coffee and food. Midday shifts to lounges, bars, and restrooms. Final destination arrival surfaces baggage claim, exits, and ground transportation. The right information at the right moment without the customer having to search for it.
The full navigation experience is powered by Atrius, providing indoor mapping at a level of detail that standard mapping platforms don't support. Customers can launch into a full-scale interactive map directly from the route preview, with turn-by-turn indoor navigation to their gate.
Validation
Tested with 8 participants in Admirals Club lounges, capturing real-time behaviors during actual connections.
Fast, glanceable guidance is the job
Customers wanted quick read, not deep browse.
Time-to-gate is the anchor
Reinforced as the single most-watched value on the screen.
Preferred over external tools
Users chose this experience over ad-hoc maps to navigate the airport.
Auto-refresh + "last updated" indicator.
Added to increase trust in the real-time data layer. When numbers move, people need to see when they moved.
06 — Impact
Operational and systemic outcomes.
Expected outcomes
Misconnect rates & HMT cost
Reduced operational cost by helping customers make the connection without intervention.
Self-service
Reduced reliance on gate agents during peak connection windows.
NPS
Improved by reducing uncertainty in the most stressful part of the journey.
Systems impact
Dynamic prioritization model
Introduced across the product org as a shared way to think about state-aware UI.
Reusable design-system patterns
Progress tracker adopted on other products; interaction patterns reused across surfaces.
Adaptive design as a posture
Helped shift the team toward state-aware, adaptive design as the default mental model.
Reflection
Designing for variability is more effective than designing for completeness.
Static experiences increase cognitive load; adaptive systems reduce user effort and operational dependency. A key misstep was overloading the interface early on — reinforcing the need for prioritization over volume.