Welcome to the second deep-dive in our Airline UX Series in partnership with 815Labs. The goal of this series is simple: to connect you with top UX leaders and experts and help you learn what makes great airline digital products.
We’re thrilled to feature such a diverse lineup of passionate designers and industry experts. Speaking of passion, it’s hard to find someone as enthusiastic about both the airline industry and UX design as Carlos Lima Santana, Senior Product Designer at British Airways. He’s a true avgeek who’s worked in nearly every customer-facing scenario before taking on a senior design role—making him an incredible source of knowledge and inspiration.
We covered a lot of different design topics in this podcast, but if you take a step back and look at the big picture, you’ll see the common threads that define what makes a truly great designer.
Listen to the new episode of the Diggintravel Podcast to discover what makes a great UX designer, from mastering the basics to balancing innovation and empathy. Or, read on for key highlights from our talk with Carlos:
And don’t forget to subscribe to the Diggintravel Podcast in your preferred podcast app to stay on top of the latest airline UX, digital strategy, marketing, data science and AI trends!
We mostly focus on digital experiences and designing airline digital products here, so it was refreshing when Carlos reminded us that the essence of design goes beyond screens and pixels. He shared a powerful reminder about the core of design and its physical roots:
Given that we’re so focused on digital experiences and we’re so focused on our screens and we’re so focused on our Figmas and our digital interactions between each other, we often forget that design is fundamentally a physical act. Design is a physical act, and every time that you design something, you’re going to be designing that in relation to your own body, so you must use your body to design.
That holds even more true for our industry, where, as Carlos points out, we are often so removed from the actual operations as designers and digital practitioners. But what does this mean for designing digital products and experiences?
It is very important to include that digital interface into the physical space so we can understand what people are trying to do, what they’re feeling, what they’re trying to achieve, what are their goals, what are their pain points.
You can only access that kind of knowledge … by investing in research, by making sure that you understand what people are trying to do, and by making sure that you’re not isolating their digital experience into only the digital realm.
Carlos stressed that focusing solely on building digital solutions without understanding the core problem can lead to superficial results. Instead, he advocates for a system-based approach that begins by asking “why” to uncover the root cause. For him, solving the right problem means looking deeper and identifying the evidence of the issue before even thinking about solutions.
Before trying to understand what to build, we need to understand, why do we need to build that? What is the tangible evidence of the problem? Why is this needed? Why are people trying to perform a certain action and they’re not having any kind of success on that?
Carlos shared a valuable lesson from a past project, where the team jumped straight into what they wanted to build without first asking why. They invested months into designing a feature that no one actually needed, simply because they hadn’t paused to understand the true problem. This experience underscored the importance of always starting with “why” before defining “what.”
So that’s the thing on asking ‘why’ versus asking ‘what.’ In that case it was a pure scenario of ‘Let’s build this’ and not ‘Why are we building this?’
Source: British Airways website (media kit)
Once you’ve figured out the why, it’s tempting to dive into building exciting new features and innovative designs. But Carlos reminds us that the foundation needs to be solid first. In other words, focusing on the basics isn’t optional—it’s essential. He references one of the core UX principles established by Jakob Nielsen, a pioneer in usability and design, known as Jakob’s Law:
There’s this law – we have a set of UX laws that we’re working with, by Jakob Nielsen a couple of decades ago, and one of them that we call Jakob’s Law in his honor is that people will expect your digital experience to work in a similar way, in a similar fashion as any other. That gives us a little bit of a walled garden approach where you can do things, but you can’t do things too differently; otherwise you risk losing people.
Carlos emphasizes that while striving for innovation is important, it’s crucial to stay within familiar frameworks that users already understand. Straying too far from these conventions can result in confusion and frustration. This is especially true in the airline industry, where most digital interactions are highly transactional.
When you talk about the airline industry, I think that the digital interactions that people have are primarily transactional in the way that they are buying something which already corresponds to a certain kind of mental model that they would have. Then once they’re using it post-order to manage their booking, for example, or to buy ancillaries or anything that they need to do on that, they would expect it to have a certain kind of organization, a certain kind of flow, so they can change the things that they need to change.
While this structure gives airlines some room to innovate, it’s critical to cover the basics consistently. Carlos highlights this as one of the biggest sources of frustration for users:
That’s, I think, the number one source of unhappiness and of stress with these kinds of interfaces: ‘The basics are not covered and I’m trying to cancel my flight’ or ‘I’m trying to work around a disruption,’ or ‘I’m trying to add a bag and I can’t find it, or I don’t know how to do it.’ This is what’s going to be making people maybe angry or unpleased with the digital experience.
But once the basics are covered, you can start thinking about innovation and building something new. This is where Carlos sees the opportunity to go beyond just meeting expectations and to create those “wow” moments. He explains that true innovation happens when you introduce what he calls unexpected efficiency—when a solution is clever because it’s surprisingly effective in a way people didn’t anticipate.
Over that, everything that’s new, everything that’s novelty, everything that’s clever – and I think that there is a definition for cleverness, that cleverness is unexpected efficiency. If people are not expecting something to be efficient and then, there you go, the solution is very clever for them, that’s where you have that delightful moment. But in order to be able to do that, you need to cover your bases. You need to cover the very basic jobs to be done that people are trying to do.
Think about unexpected efficiency the next time you build a digital experience or product. That’s the difference between just getting the job done and truly delighting your users.
The only way to be sure that you’re addressing both the why and the what is through thorough testing. For Carlos, testing isn’t just a step—it’s a constant process that should be embedded in every stage of design. He explains:
I think it’s really important, and even central, for organizations to frontload the design process as much as they can… To test as constantly as possible, as early as possible, and with as many different resources as possible.
Testing is what allows designers to move from the divergence phase—where you’re generating as many creative ideas as possible—to the convergence phase, where you refine those ideas into practical solutions. Carlos emphasized that both phases are essential, but the key is to know when to transition and let testing guide the process:
Once you’re diverging, the possibilities that are open for you will present themselves not only through business data and analytics but also through research, inquiry, exploration, competitor analysis, and generation of different concepts. That’s a very creative phase, and the answers and clues that we identify at that point are many, but not all are feasible or desirable. So, that’s where the convergence phase comes in. We start narrowing down those possibilities by testing the things we’ve generated and discarding unworkable ideas, which brings us to the right solution.
To become a good UX designer, you need to be able to detach yourself from your own work. Carlos emphasized that getting too attached can hinder objectivity and lead to biased decisions. He points out that designers, especially at the junior level, often fall into the trap of becoming emotionally invested in their designs. But being open to feedback and willing to let go is key to improving your craft:
I think that there is an issue with design professionals, especially in more junior levels, where we can very often fall in love with our work. You feel like something is so nice, and you feel like something is so well thought out, and you feel like something is so beautiful… But this is a very dangerous and a very negative place to be as a designer. I usually tell my students the best way for you to increase in seniority as a product designer is to stop falling in love with your work.
Not falling in love with your work is a good start, but I wanted to dig deeper and ask Carlos if he could single out just one thing that truly makes a great designer. Without hesitation, he pointed to empathy—something he believes is at the core of effective design.
If I had to say the one thing that makes or breaks a designer… the one thing is empathy. You cannot be a designer if you’re not empathetic. And when I say empathy, empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is about having the ability to put yourself into someone else’s experience. A designer without empathy is a designer that’s going to be designing for themselves, which is also very dangerous and very risky for the craft.
Carlos believes that empathy is not just about understanding users; it’s also about connecting with different teams and stakeholders. For him, the greatest power of a designer is to be a transdisciplinary professional—someone who can bridge the gap between different fields and bring them together. This means that, even if a designer isn’t an expert in a specific problem space, they need to immerse themselves deeply enough to understand the context and connect with others.
Empathy is central to be able to build those bridges because those bridges can only be built if you’re also able to meet people in the middle.
Listen to the full podcast chat with Carlos to gain detailed insights into:
To dive deeper into these topics, make sure to listen to the entire podcast. You can access it through the embedded podcast player in this article or on your favorite podcast platform.
If you want to learn from leaders like Carlos about airline UX, digital optimization, data science, and AI, or just want to be the first to know when our next Airline UX Series interview will be published, please
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