Travel Experience

Lobby Vision

Reimagining the Experience

Alaska Airlines

Four years designing the full self-service ecosystem at Alaska Airlines, from checking in on the mobile app to bag drop machines to digital signage, as the airline grew from domestic to international, merged with Hawaiian, and expanded to 9+ languages. My role evolved from UI designer to lead product designer, and my focus shifted from shipping features to solving a harder problem: changing guest behavior in one of the most stressful environments in the world.

  • Role

    UI Designer → Lead Product Designer

  • Timeframe

    2021–present

  • Scale

    Millions of passengers

  • Project

    Self-service 

The problem that emerged over time

Features weren't the bottleneck

When I started on the lobby team, the work looked like standard digital product work: design the kiosk UI, ship the flow, move on. But working in real airports, watching real passengers interact with these machines, revealed something that never shows up in analytics: guests weren't failing because the interface was bad. They were failing because they didn't know what to do before they got there.

Over four years, I came to see guest education as the core unsolved problem in airport self-service design. A guest who approaches the bag drop machine for the first time is in a fundamentally different situation from one who has successfully used one before. The physical environment, the stress, the time pressure — all of it collapses the cognitive bandwidth available for learning a new interface in the moment.

Work across the lobby — five chapters

  • Check-in — from kiosk to mobile app and web

    As check-in shifted from physical kiosks to the Alaska app and web experience, a mobile boarding pass became the key to the touchless lobby concepts. I worked across the transition and platforms. This work required designing consistently across physical and digital surfaces so the lobby experience felt coherent regardless of where a guest started.

  • Bag tag kiosk attract screen — using motion to shift scan-first behavior

    Redesigned the attract screen for Alaska's new-generation bag tag printers, using tested animation to redirect guests from tapping to scanning. Solved for legibility at 5 feet, multilingual UI, and FAA/WCAG/ACAA accessibility standards.

  • Automated bag drop — a new self-service behavior, launched at PDX and SEA

    Led UI design across four phases, from vendor audit through in-airport testing at PDX and live launch at two airports. Developed a custom illustration system to teach bag placement without relying on photography. Promoted to lead product designer during Phase 4.

  • Digital and print signage — wayfinding concepts tested in lab and airport

    Contributed to signage concepts for lobby wayfinding and gate areas, including testing sessions in the lab and in-airport at PDX, SEA, and SFO. The work fed into the broader lobby strategy even though final production was handed off. Each airport had distinct physical constraints that shaped the design approach differently.

  • Gate signage and TSA biometrics — designing for the next phase of the lobby

    Contributed to gate signage concepts and early work on incorporating TSA biometric integration into the passenger flow. This work sits within a lobby future vision — thinking about where the experience needs to be, not just where it is.

Testing across six airports revealed what the lab couldn't

  • PDX

    Portland, OR

    Primary deployment and test environment. First live bag drop launch Aug 2024. Familiar passenger base, strong baseline data.

  • SEA

    Seattle, WA

    Second major deployment Nov 2024. Higher volume, more complex lobby layout, different passenger mix. Scale stress-test. Constant construction.

  • SFO

    San Francisco, CA

    High-volume, tech-forward passenger base. Different self-service expectations. Testing revealed assumptions that didn't hold from PDX data.

  • HNL

    Honolulu, HI

    Post-merger integration. Hawaiian Airlines brand reconciliation. High international + tourist traveler proportion. Additional language and accessibility profile.

  • LAX

    Los Angeles, CA

    Large, complex terminal environment. More international travelers, a different traveler mix. Additional payment needs and devices.

  • PSP

    Palm Springs, CA

    Smaller market, different traveler profile. Useful contrast case for self-service design scales from hub airports. Unique baggage needs.

Merger integration and internationalisation

The Alaska–Hawaiian merger meant integrating two brand identities (which somehow turned into 4 brand identities), two sets of airport environments, and two traveler cultures — all while continuing to ship. Translating the lobby experience into 9+ languages wasn't just a localisation task — it was a layout and IA problem. Instructions that fit comfortably in English often required fundamental restructuring in other languages without losing the glanceability that the kiosk environment demands. Language length variability was a design constraint baked into every component.

What this taught me about designing for language

You can't design for 9 languages by designing for English and translating. Every layout decision has to be made with the longest likely string in mind. And in an airport environment where legibility at distance matters, a 40% longer string isn't just a formatting problem — it's a comprehension problem. We built language-variable components from the start.

Guest education is a business requirement

The insight that shaped the last year of this work: the biggest friction in self-service adoption isn't the machine interface. It's that guests arrive at the machine having never encountered it before, in a high-stress environment, with no preparation. The most carefully designed kiosk UI in the world can't compensate for a guest who doesn't know what they're about to be asked to do.

I built and presented the case to leadership that proactive guest education — through the app, through pre-trip communications, through the check-in flow itself — is a business requirement, not a nice-to-have. The data supported it: error rates, agent intervention rates, and throughput metrics all improved when guests arrived prepared. This isn't just a UX insight. It's an operational and revenue argument.

“You can only design for what you know. Real-world use revealed a deeper connection between digital design and existing physical systems than any amount of lab testing could have.”

— Reflection after PDX launch

Four years of compounding work

The work isn't finished — which is part of the point. We’re currently addressing ecosystem-wide problems that only became visible after live deployment. A new lobby vision is being built to address and strategize for the future. Designing for a real physical environment means the feedback loop never closes, and every shipped feature surfaces the next layer of complexity.

Successes:

<1 min bag drop completion at PDX/SEA

9+ Languages across full lobby UI

6+ Airport environments tested in

75%+ mobile boarding pass adoption