UltraBasic and Extended Comfort
Designing strategic user experiences for the launch of two product offerings.
Role
Lead designer
Timeline
6 months
Platforms
Web, Mobile
Areas
Strategy, Design
$3M+
flight revenue from design
$35M
loss averted from UX strategy
Background
In 2023, WestJet announced it would be going back to its roots as a low-cost airline. In 2024, this strategy would be rolled out with the UltraBasic fare and Extended Comfort seat. Operationally, these new offerings would improve bag congestion at the gate, helping flights leave on time. However, the new offerings came with its own challenge — confusing fare restrictions, new baggage rules, and changing fees. I worked on the end-to-end digital experience from booking to check-in.
Helping guests understand what is and isn’t included for their flight
The challenge
We had three main challenges to execute the design — the six month timeline, satisfying numerous stakeholders at once, and breaking down confusing policies into digestible experiences. The digital launch involved coordinating across nine product teams, six digital platforms, and over 100 employees.
Challenge #1
With extremely tight timelines, there were heavy technical constraints on what we would be able to build.
Two products in six months
Challenge #2
Many stakeholders had strong opinions about what the experience needed to be. There was high risk creating designs that satisfied everyone, but pleased no one.
Designing by committee
Challenge #3
Guests needed clarity on what was included with their flights like what bags they could and could not bring, which varied by route and seat
Confusing airline policies
Guest journey opportunities
The Discovery
Understanding Current Sentiment
To ground our design decisions in user insights, we initiated the discovery phase with comprehensive user research. We conducted two baseline tests: one to gauge guest sentiment towards the current Basic fare experience and another to identify the attributes guests valued most.
These insights informed both the design and the communication strategy, ensuring that we addressed the existing pain points while creating a more intuitive and guest-friendly experience.
Research insight #1
Guests appreciated the simplicity of the current booking flow but often found the fare rules unclear. Key pain points included difficulty in understanding baggage policies and frustration with inconsistent experiences across platforms.
Unclear fare rules
Research insight #2
Top general categories were change/cancel, baggage, and then seat selection. To meet operational goals, we swapped the order of change/cancel with baggage. When upgrading, guests cared most about getting extra legroom.
What guests care about
Left: Fare attributes. Right: Extended Comfort banner. Attribute order for both informed by UX research
The Vision
Developing Design Principles
To align with WestJet’s business strategy and deliver a user-centred experience, we established three key design principles -- upsell where it matters, guest education, and consistency in the experience. These principles guided the development of over 50 features across six products:
Upselling where it matters
Understanding that UltraBasic guests are highly price-sensitive, we strategically placed upsell opportunities at key decision points to maximize impact and assist guests in making informed choices without feeling overwhelmed.
Experience A
Experience B
Experience A
Experience B
Left: A/B testing the Basic card hierarchy. Right: A/B testing the refreshed modal design
Throughout and after the project launch, we ran multiple A/B tests to monitor how guests would respond to design and strategy changes.
Optimization insight #1
Design strategy flagged concerns that a proposed solution would be a poor experience. We proved this with data that showed changing directions avoided a potential loss of 35M in flight revenue and 2M in ancillary revenue.
Challenging strategies
Optimization insight #2
Designs increased buy up to Economy by almost 5%, contributing to over 3M in flight revenue and 400K in ancillary revenue.
Updated design patterns
Creating a good holistic experience
To ensure the success of the project, we approached the design from a holistic perspective, focusing on end-to-end guest experiences. As the only team overseeing the complete guest journey, we took responsibility for ensuring the look and feel, interactions, and information delivery were accurate and easy to understand. This approach extended beyond digital interfaces to consider the airport and in-flight experiences, aligning with WestJet’s operational goals and reducing potential strain on the contact centre.
Consistent look for Extended Comfort banners across five touchpoints
Educating guests
To support operational goals, we prioritized clear communication of fare rules and baggage allowances. The use of repetition helped reinforced the guests memory. This was to minimize any confusion guests may have, reducing the need for support from frontline and call centre staff.
Impact
Our refreshed design flows catered to a diverse audience, ensuring guests could easily understand the product offerings, select the ancillaries they valued, and only pay for what they truly needed. This scenario allowed WestJet to welcome price-sensitive guests, generate additional revenue, and improve the overall guest experience.
Design helped guests easily understand product offering while giving them opportunities to select extras they valued.
Takeaways
Leading a team
This was my first time leading a team, especially one comprised of all contractors. It was chaotic at the start, onboarding everyone to understand complex products. Of the six months, we spent the first one deep diving into different products, understanding the opportunities and constraints. Taking full ownership of design also meant providing good feedback to the design team, ensuring that we aligned with existing standards. Through all this, I learned how to manage, organize, and prioritize design requirements to keep the team on track and on time.
Design debt and streamlining process
This project was the largest initiative we undertook since switching to Figma. The scale and scope posed challenges, such as Figma files becoming too large to load and Zeplin being difficult to navigate. To overcome these obstacles, we established a source of truth file for product owners to reference, created an archival system for managing design iterations, and optimized component creation. We organized pages to make them easily navigable by all team members, ensuring efficiency and clarity throughout the design process.
Stakeholder management
With the scale of the project, there were many many stakeholders to juggle. From individual Product Owners to VPs, everyone had wants and needs, and strong ones. I had two major takeaways from this process — be empowered to flag concerns and speak the stakeholders language. With so many questions about the offerings, I ran a workshop with key stakeholders to do a Q&A. This ended up being a major help and further aligned the team in our vision. When presenting designs to VPs, speaking in terms of capturing revenue, improving operations and mitigating negative brand reception sped up our approvals as leadership understood our thinking.
Gina Hsu 2025