An AI assistant that helps travelers navigate flight disruptions and rebook with peace of mind.
Timeline
Jan 2025 - Mar 2025
Role
Design Lead, User Researcher
Skills
UI/UX Design, UX Research, AI Design
Snow is an intelligent travel assistant that learns your preferences and uses real-time insights to support decision-making during flight disruptions. Designed to guide travelers with clarity and confidence, Snow takes the stress out of rebooking and other travel tasks.
Feature Update
Book Trips
Auto Rebook
Northwestern’s EDI program partners with industry leaders annually for its interaction design course. This year, we collaborated with a major U.S. airline to reimagine the customer experience during irregular flight operations—disruptions such as delays and cancellations, also known as “IROPs.”
For customers: it's the stress and confusion of disrupted trips, often due to limited agency, transparency, or support.
For airline staff: it's the overwhelming task of fielding requests and rebookings during these high-pressure periods.
For the business: it means overstaffing “just in case,” leading to inefficiencies when operations are running normally.
Our journey began on the ground at the airport, where we conducted on-site research, observing travelers in their day-to-day. We also had the opportunity to shadow some Customer Service Agents (CSAs) to see what it was like to handle IROPS from the operational side. In total, we conducted 12+ interviews, uncovering key pain points and insights for our project.
Rebooking flights through agents at the counter emerged as a major pain point for both travelers and employees. During IROPS, it becomes particularly challenging to handle large volumes of requests while maintaining high-quality support and reassurance. This is where we saw the clearest opportunity to drive immediate impact and chose it as our starting point.
Uncertainty while waiting causes anxiety: Travelers feel anxious standing in line without knowing how long they’ll wait or what kind of help they’ll receive.
Human interaction builds trust:
Travelers rely on real people for support, especially when stressed. It helps them feel seen, heard, and reassured.
Guidance, not just access:
Pairing tools with guidance makes the rebooking process easier and less stressful.
Our client’s primary business goals were to improve employee efficiency, increase customer autonomy, and uphold their gold standard of service. Given our limited time and access, especially to internal employee tools, we decided to focus on the digital app instead.
We initially explored ways to ease rebooking chaos at the counter. Kiosks felt redundant—they’d just create more lines, and travelers already have a kiosk in their pocket: their phone.
That led us to consider a digital queue that would eliminate the need to stand in line altogether. Travelers could request agent help and be notified when it was their turn, giving them the freedom to grab a snack or make a call while they waited.
Early iterations & future state vision - Reduced crowding at counters, with clear signage to guide travelers toward the digital queue.
After revisiting our research, we asked ourselves: were we doing enough to reassure users during their wait? Was there also an opportunity to optimize for efficiency while easing the load on employees?
“Most of my time is spent figuring out what someone needs. If we already had some context, even a sentence or two, I could move faster and help more people.” - Kevin, CSA
“We definitely spend a lot of time at the counter for basic things that the customer could have done like rebooking. But it does make them feel valued and secure.” - Jen, CSA
How might we better support and reassure travelers during their wait, while easing the workload for agents at the counter?
Introducing Snow AI, an agentic travel assistant designed to support and reassure travelers at every stage of their journey, from booking to cancellations and beyond.
Snow isn’t meant to replace human interaction, but to act as a helpful in-between, giving travelers immediate support without needing to wait in line. It also assists CSAs by handling routine tasks like rebooking, easing their workload so they can focus on helping those who need it most.
Travelers requesting to see an agent are prompted to briefly describe their issue. This allows Snow to resolve smaller problems instantly or pass helpful context to the agent before the visit. If the issue is solved on the spot, the traveler can skip the visit altogether. If not, they’ll still spend less time at the counter.
