Simple Case Study

Results



Dated, unusable on mobile, and visibly behind the brand it represented. Redundant patterns meant customers navigated the same decisions more than once. For Air New Zealand, a store that felt second-rate wasn't just a UX problem. It was a brand risk. Every customer who bounced was a loyalty moment lost.
The brief: redesign it to a standard the brand could stand behind.
Double diamond approach. Kept the research phase separate from design to avoid collapsing the two too early. Workshops and prototyping sessions with stakeholders across the business. Customer data gathered to pinpoint where the experience was failing.In parallel, benchmarked leading retail and loyalty stores globally.
One question driving it: what does world-class look like for a customer at this point in their journey? That benchmark became the design north star.
Stakeholder workshops from day one. Stakeholders, brand, developers, and PM all in the mix. Running structured workshops early meant everyone understood the direction and had shaped it. That buy-in paid off throughout the build.
External team, managed closely. Working with an external frontend team added coordination overhead. The answer was over-communication: detailed specs, clear rationale, and regular checkpoints so nothing got lost in translation.
Mobile as a first-class surface. The previous store treated mobile as an afterthought. This redesign didn't. Mobile was designed in parallel from the start, not retrofitted at the end.
Brand-led. UX-driven. Every decision was held against two questions: does this feel like Air New Zealand, and does it make the task easier? Where those two were in tension, we worked through it, not around it.
Increased sales and Airpoints accrual following launch, validated through usability testing.
Workshop consensus is not customer validation. The double diamond gave us a strong research foundation, but I'd have pushed for formal usability testing before stakeholder sign-off, not after. Some navigation decisions would have been sharper for it.
Working with an external development team taught me to specify more and assume less. That discipline made the handover cleaner than most internal builds I've worked on.