User Centered Design for a Seamless Customer Experience

User Centered Design is central to the Charter and Go’s value proposition to give a voice to the end consumer in the charter industry. This design process is an optimistic approach to create a new solution that starts with our target demographic (real humans), which will lead us to the answers tailored to their needs. This allows us to empathize with the user. We build empathy through user research, competitive analysis, and the simple art of effective communications. 

A process that we use at Charter and Go to help understand the user, defining the opportunity, creating the solution, and validating with the end user is through Design Thinking. Within the UX and design industry Design Thinking is the new popular buzz word, and I understand that it does have its pros and cons. That being said, After years of working on innovation focused teams, design thinking is a solid process when building a concept from the ground up. Charter and Go is an innovative company using the technology and digital trends of tomorrow to catapult the limited digital Charter Industry into the future and into the end user’s hands. 

The key message for this article is that the team at Charter and Go has decades worth of experience in the travel industry, and through empathy with the traveler we have recognized and defined the problem that we are working to create a solution to make the end user’s life easier.  Within the design thinking process, the first step is to clearly define the problem and frame the opportunity that is a solution that meets the specific and unique needs of the target demographic. Charter and Go has defined these needs, and are using innovative technology to create Experiential Learning.

Experiential learning is a core technology tenet of our experiences, to understand what works with the end user, what workflows are redundant and what changes can be made to enhance productivity to complete the booking. A core tenet of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is continuous learning to improve a product or business process. At the intersection of humans and intelligent machines, A.I. can enable each entity to evolve to greater heights than if they existed alone. To support the process of continuous learning we analyze weblogs on how customers are using the product and how it can be improved over time. With the experiential learning philosophy, we bridge the gap between theory and practice, increase consumer engagement levels, and accelerate the adoption of changing consumer behaviors as the charter landscape, both competitive and technology, changes over time. We believe that Experiential A.I. advances the human-centered approach to achieve greater productivity and consumer satisfaction.

The next step in Design Thinking is to build empathy by understanding the end user. We start by clearly defining who the end user is, how they work in the context of the solution you defined. Empathy allows us to identify the real needs and motivations of users. For example, motorcycle companies are starting to use technology to help motorcyclists interact with the new complex bikes without the need to take their eyes off the road or their hands off the handlebars. They empathized with the motorcyclist by recognizing the risk and danger and are creating a solution based on that empathy. Understanding the user also means, that we must get out and talk to them to get a full understanding of their wants and needs. 

An example of what has been learned in the charter industry through empathizing with the end user is providing them with relevant content. Relevance of content and how flights are ranked and displayed based on customer preferences when a flight search request is made is a cornerstone of the recommendation engine.  With the active repositioning model for flight search which returns a large number of charter options for the preferred aircraft type, the trade-off analytics imbedded in the recommendation engine ensures that only the most relevant charter options are presented to an end consumer.

Charter and Go has defined the solution and know who our end users are. The research was done to explore our options and ideas for us to build the best product meeting the user’s needs. An important task that Charter and Go took on was to highlight the current pain points for the user within the Charter industry. Currently Charter and Go is validating these ideas with actual Users throughout the country. We are using the best in class design standards for all of our experiences. Also, through empathizing with our users we are actively working to ensure accessibility. We are using new innovative technology to meet these needs. The role of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in the future to enhance user interfaces opens a vast untapped potential. When we look beyond chatbots and voice recognition, we are excited about what the future holds. Our A.I. philosophy brings context, relevance, and personalization to the charter booking process. Quintessential to the success of our booking engine and value proposition is to make sure that customers are able to comfortably use and understand the digital experiences we provide at Charter and Go. We are also going to continuous grow and improve the experiences over time to ensure that we meet the user’s needs through empathy.

Joe Jennings – Chief Design Director