View Reservation

The Problem

A decade of patchwork on a page that couldn't afford to break

Alaska Airlines was preparing for a massive expansion — acquiring Hawaiian Airlines and going global. But their online reservation system was still running on "the monolith," a rigid tangle of interdependent legacy systems where seemingly innocent code changes could cause outages in unexpected places.

The View Reservation page — the single most important post-booking touchpoint for every traveler — hadn't been meaningfully updated in over a decade. Instead of redesigning, teams had layered alert banners on top of each other to communicate new requirements: RealID, pandemic protocols, policy changes. Users arrived at their reservation to find a wall of mixed-era, mixed-relevance notifications.

Compounding the problem, this team had struggled with retention. PMs, engineers, and designers had cycled through, frustrated by the constraints. No one had stayed long enough to push through a real overhaul.

Kick Off

A two-day workshop to align everyone

I organized a cross-functional workshop at Alaska's Seattle headquarters, bringing together design, product, and engineering stakeholders. I asked everyone flying in to evaluate their own travel experience — some on phone, some on tablet, some on desktop — taking screenshots of every friction point. This way, we all arrived with first-hand perspective.

Together, we audited the page and uncovered problems that weren't obvious at first glance:

• No built-in analytics — we were flying blind on user behavior.
• The page wasn't responsive. At all.
• Alaska's most important revenue opportunity (credit card offer) was buried below a wall of ads.
• Years of regulatory changes had left a mix of outdated and critical information with no hierarchy.
• There was no menu of actions — guests searching for something as simple as flight notifications had to hunt.
• Subpages had no consistent design patterns or brand coherence.

The scope was larger than anyone anticipated. We left Seattle understanding we had 4 months of intense design work ahead.

Research

Heatmaps, interviews, and hard truths

Working with Alaska's UX research team, we enabled heatmaps and conducted early-stage interviews. The findings shaped every design decision that followed:

• Users scanned the page multiple times to find where to enter TSA information.
• Guests who had already checked in were checking in again — the button didn't reflect their status.
• Only 16% of users scrolled past a block of ads near the bottom, causing them to miss valuable trip information.
• Users were tolerant of data collection as long as it improved their experience.
• People were frustrated when other airlines showed ads before flight details — they wanted their information first.

Challenges

Losing our PM, adapting the design system, and scaling under pressure

Shortly after the workshop, our product manager left. As the design lead, I absorbed PM responsibilities — attending leadership shakeouts, roadmap meetings, and serving as the bridge between our team and the business. With support from my design manager and PM leadership, I filled the gap while keeping design work on track.

Alaska's Auro design system was still young, and its components had been built for the revenue side of the business (ticket sales). We had to adapt existing components for our needs without overburdening the design system team — essentially extending the system as we used it.

Meanwhile, the app version of the page (built by a vendor) was experiencing engineering issues, driving even more traffic to our web page and raising the stakes on our delivery timeline.

Design & Rollout

Shipping incrementally, learning continuously

After 3 months of iterative design, we landed on an MVP that addressed the most critical issues: a personalization layer for user preferences, a side menu for page actions, built-in analytics, consistent notification patterns, and thoughtfully placed ads and upsells.

We rolled out to progressively larger user groups — one-way single passengers first, then multi-passenger, then round trips, then mixed-carrier reservations. As each group came in, we monitored performance and adjusted.

Honest Reflection

What didn't work

The initial design featured a large hero image showing the trip destination, taking up three-quarters of the mobile screen. It tested well in research, but after launch, real users found it obnoxious — especially those traveling for serious reasons. I reduced it to about one-fifth of the screen so flight details were visible without scrolling.

I also experimented with reordering page content based on proximity to the trip — showing passenger info two weeks out, flight details 72 hours before departure. This disoriented users who expected a consistent layout. We pulled the feature, with plans to reintroduce it later alongside onboarding that explained the personalization.

Outcomes

Built to scale into a global airline

By the time Alaska acquired Hawaiian Airlines in mid-2025, the View Reservation page was fully modernized. Even with the growing pains of becoming a global airline, it has remained the most reliable way for travelers to manage their reservations and check in across both carriers.