I worked on-site in Dubai at Emirates HQ and at Tigerspike's London and Poland offices. I worked closely with Niko to conceptualised the user experience of the apps, and during production I led the design team and bridged the gap with Emirates internal development team with Imtiyaz.

While in Dubai, we work side-by-side with key stakeholders and internal teams inside Emirates. We went through an open, collaborative and iterative approach, including the Emirates team in daily updates. We attended daily development stand-ups and collaborated directly with developers.

While in London and Poland, I reported to Tigerspike Sales, Accounts, UX, Development directors. I led and coordinated the design production of the Emirates project with our UX and UI teams of designers, architects and researchers.

This was a very complex project as we had to work within the restrictions of a complex legacy technology, as well as with the feedback and insights from a large number of stakeholders representing many internal teams within Emirates. Another challenge we faced was collaborating and coordinating effectively different workflows within a large distributed design team separated from the internal development team. The design and development consequently took longer than expected, due to balance this with creating and user experience which was engaging and useful.

Niko and I spent months sketching and wireframing the apps. We went through many iterative loops between ourselves, the Tigerspike design team and the Emirates internal team. We spent time inside the airport analysing the current customer experience and interviewing travellers.

From many visual concepts and mock-ups, the Emirates team wanted to have a rich and luxurious experience that reflected the Emirates brand, which led us to designing a skeuomorphic UI design style. This while very brand fitting, took a very long time to craft the huge experience offered by the apps. 

During the design, I focused particularly on the experience of the booking process. This included exploring where to go, booking the flight, pre and post customer communication and boarding pass. I also work on the inflight experience to access Emirates on-board ICE entertainment system and the Skywards members area.

The booking system was a design challenge as it relied on an old and complex tech stack with many limitations and requirements. It also was connected to many stakeholders, including the Web, Legal, Sales and communications teams internally. I designed a progressive disclosure experienced, which focused on the current task, but the stacking up the completed sections to form the booking reciept.