Eva Air app redesign

Context:
According to statistics from the Taiwan Tourism Administration, the number of Taiwanese travellers nearly doubled post-pandemic, rising from 0.65 million in 2023 to 1.38 million in 2024. As one of Taiwan’s largest international airline companies, EVA Air boasts the highest passenger load factor among Taiwan-based airlines, based on data from the Civil Aviation Administration of Taiwan as of October 2024.

Despite this strong performance, EVA Air's mobile app has received lackluster ratings in app stores, indicating user dissatisfaction. To address this issue, the design thinking process was applied in order to enhance the overall user experience for passengers.

Design process:
1. User research
To better understand the reasons behind the app's low ratings and identify actionable improvements, several user interviews were conducted. Prior to the interviews, a detailed script was carefully prepared to ensure a smooth process and maximize the collection of relevant insights. This structured approach facilitated the gathering of comprehensive feedback while maintaining focus on the app's core issues.

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Warm-up questions:

- What's your name and how old are you?
- What's your profession?
- How often do you travel abroad? What's the trip for?
- Where did you travel to last time? Who did you travel with?
- Did you book the ticket by yourself? If yes, what platform did you use for booking?

(A situation provided: thinking back the travelling experience last time)

User experience questions:
- How was your overall experience with the process last time?
- Was there anything that left a strong impression on you?
- What was the most inconvenient part of the process? Did it affect your enthusiasm for traveling abroad?
- During the process, which part did you find the most challenging, worrisome, or stressful? Why?
- (Show screenshots of the Tigerair app) Do you think these features could help reduce your stress or anxiety during immigration procedures? Why or why not?
- Are there any additional features you think should be included, or how could these features be designed to better meet your needs?‍
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2. User pain points
After the interviews, three main user paint points are identified:
- Insufficient information of destination country: In existing airline apps, it’s unable to obtain relevant information about the destination airport, such as entry procedures, airport maps, and related regulations.
- Dispersed information: The interviewees hope the app could centrally manage travel related information rather than searching them across multiple different websites.
- Tend to get lost in foreign airports: 3 interviewees expressed that it was easy to get lost when finding the boarding gate, especially in foreign international airports (language barrier).
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3. Personas
‍To better empathise with users, two personas are created based on the insights gathered from the interviews:
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4. Functional map:
After defining the problems, several solutions are ideated to address users' pain points. By considering the cost, effectiveness and feasibility of each solution, features such as guide map, boarding information and entry-related information are added to the existant application as shown in the functional map.

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‍5. Wireframes:
An early-stage visual presentation was created in order to further test with users for the structure and primary functions, and to identify potential problems before progress to a high fidelity prototype.

6. Usability test:
A usability test is conducted with five participants to get users’ feedback to improve the existing design and the functions provided.

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After the usability test, users’ feedbacks are organised into two parts for further improvement of the app:
Aesthetic
‍- Using different colors to distinguish remaining time for boarding
- No overly bold or vivid color and stay simple on the number of colors

Functional
‍- Adding the distance from current location to boarding gate
- Providing flight information as well on the page of boarding gate information
- Using a timer to count down for the remaining time to board
- Providing search bar for the filter
- Entry information could also include entry policies or travel alert  for wars or diseases

7. High fidelity prototype:
In this phase, with the feedbacks collected during the usability test, some functions are slightly modified and the elements of each screen are designed carefully with a color palette and typography pre-defined to align with the brand identity of Eva Air.

Colors:
To match the brand image created by Eva air as ‘Safety first, Confort and Luxury, Innovative’, green-tone calm colors are used to create the color palette.

Typography:
Lato is used as the typeface of this app for its readability, aesthetic and versatility for font weight.

Conclusion:
This redesign project focused on enhancing the overall user interface and user experience by translating user insights into practical features aimed at reducing passenger stress and concerns. As a junior designer, it provided me with an invaluable opportunity to apply the design thinking process and deepen my understanding of UX fundamentals.
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Challenge
One challenge I faced was balancing ideal solutions with real-world feasibility. For example, during the ideation phase for improving boarding gate information, I envisioned a panoramic guiding map to clearly navigate users. However, technical constraints, such as the difficulty of accurately determining indoor locations, limited this approach's viability.
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Improvement
Since this is an app designed for passengers all over the world, when conducting similar interviews in the future, interviewee demographics could be expanded in order for a more inclusive range of participants in terms of age and nationalities.