The challenge

Rewind back to 2021 I was finishing my travels around Mexico, Costa Rica and the Caribbean I was heading home and ready for my next role. I wanted the biggest Design challenge I could find and an airline after a global pandemic felt like it hit the spot.

As you can imagine, when I joined BA in May 2021 the business, Digital department and Design team weren’t in a great place. I scored the Design practice at BA on the Design Maturity Index, realising the department was at 0.5 out of 5 I knew how big the task was - a complete reset and rebuild; standards, attitutudes, buy-in, tooling, processes, relationships, you name it, it had to be rebuilt - I got what I asked for!

Fast forward nearly 3 years and we’re a team of 44 Designers and Researchers, working on ba.com, ba app and Digital Transformation. We’re multi award winning for our practices and leaders in UK airline accessibility.

The below gives you some detail and I can tell you all about it; what worked, what didn’t work in person.

British Airways

Achievements

Business impact 🧠

Metrics available at interview.

Digital Transformation 🚀

Leading the strategy for Design & Research for Digital Transformation across multiple lines of the business and a variety of senior stakeholders
More detail can be shared in person

Leaders in Accessibility ⭐️

CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) top out of 11 UK airlines for Digital Accessibility
Fully accessibility Design System
Research with participants with different accessibility needs
Training for every Design, Product Owner, Researcher and Developer
Standards for each role type

Award winning team 🏆

🏆 Best Customer Experience, CX Travel awards - British Airways, 2023
🏆 Best Accessibility Mission DX Awards - British Airways, 2023
🏆 Distinguished Luminary Award, Human Insights Summit - British Airways, 2023
🥇 1st place in CAA Digital Accessibility for UK airlines - British Airways, 2023

Democratisation of Research 🕵🏼‍♂️

Democratised Research, enables Designers to run tactical studies and empowering Researchers to run larger, more strategic work.
Our number of Research studies increased from 57 in 2022 to 319 so far in 2023, a huge 560% uplift and still Q4 to go.

Design Maturity 📈

Indexed BA on the Design Maturity scale in 2021 and it was 0.5 out of 5
Steadily increasing to 2 out of 5 in 2022 and finally 3.8 in Q2 of 2023
Hired 29 Designers & Researchers
and Created Design Guild across the business of 4 teams
Taking a business from the very bottom of the scale to 4 out of 5 is very challenging but also necessary and the rewards are huge ⬅️ ⬆️