Southwest Airlines / Product Design

Elevating airline operations with digital tools for flight attendants

Using design system components and existing app patterns saves development time and costs while creating a satisfying employee experience.

Challenge: Every month at Southwest Airlines, flight attendants bid on the next month's schedule in an online auction. Line schedules are then awarded to the flight attendants based on seniority.

A union contract defines legal obligations that Southwest must meet regarding the auction process, including modern digital tools for bidding on a monthly line schedule.

My Role

As a Principal Designer, I collaborated with product managers, researchers, subject matter experts, and developers to design the Planner and Flight Attendent applications.

Mockups of Planner and Flight Attendant screens in the Line Bid & Award app.

Using Existing Patterns for Speed

Before I joined the Southwest team, another designer had completed designs for Flight Attendants to bid on their yearly vacation time.

These designs were imported from Sketch, so I implemented autolayout and other efficient Figma features so that I'd be able to reuse patterns that were already validated with users.

Since the product team was on a tight timeline, there wasn't room to create many new patterns unless absolutely necessary.

Animated GIF of the workflow for creating a cover letter for each base. A cover letter is a a document contractually required to be provided to flight attendants each bid round. Planners create this document using the InFlight app.

Saving Time & Prevent Errors

Line Bid & Award Planners currently using manually processes such as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, macros, and other old applications will save hours using the new app.

Lessons Learned

  1. Flight Attendants bid on their monthly schedules AND yearly vacation.

    Honestly, this still blows my mind. Imagine if a lottery determined your monthly schedule and yearly vacation time!


  2. Flight jargon and acronyms, oh my!

    I'm still learning.

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