Porter Flight Status
Helping travellers know what's happening before they have to ask.
Team
Me (Product designer)
1 UX Designer
4 Developers
1 Business analyst
1 CX lead
Skills / Tools
Figma
User research
Design systems
Userlytics
Timeline
Aug - Dec 2025
STATUS
Handed off
The second-most visited flow at Porter had a clarity problem.
1
Poor grouping between key actions harms usability.
2
Secondary information clutters the page, shifting the user's focus.
3
Competing system states and dated layouts fail to quickly add clarity about flight info.
Ineffective architecture made users manually search for connecting flights.
Status before everything else
Passengers use this page between gates, mid-connection, or when plans change fast. The question is always the same: is this flight on time? Usability sessions confirmed what we suspected: passengers couldn't easily locate their status. I restructured the layout to be more scannable.
Status first. Route and timing second. Everything else organized by urgency.
Don't make users search for connections
Mid-project, a backend constraint surfaced: the system couldn't tell whether a passenger was continuing on a connecting flight or ending their trip at a layover. I placed the next leg beneath the main result, visible to everyone, so no one has to find it manually.
Next leg shown by default. No separate search required.
Dark blue anchors the primary view
I used Porter's dark blue to pull attention to the the page's main elements.
The hierarchy reads before you process a word.
Add aircraft info to build brand familiarity
I pushed for adding aircraft details and onboard service info for brand awareness and to help passengers recognize their plane. Users called it out unprompted in testing, with one saying "oh, this section is really fun! I love it."
Aircraft type, configuration, and onboard services. Useful before boarding, memorable after.
All five usability test participants found their flight without help. All five rated the redesign higher than the original on clarity and ease of use.
I mentored Victoria through Porter's component library during the project. At the end, she replicated the same screen twice, once with the design system and once without. With it, she finished 20% faster.
Porter had no baseline data on support calls tied to flight status. Measuring that rate before and after launch would put a number on the redesign's business value.
The clearest next step is iOS Live Activities: real-time flight status on the lock screen before passengers open the app. I pitched it to the mobile lead during the project. They're investigating it.