BLADE mobile App

“Travel by helicopter, seaplane or jet around cities and popular destinations.”

THE CHALLENGE

Improve the user experience of a SaaS platform with consumer mobile touchpoints.

MY ROLE

BLADE Urban Air Mobility, Inc. is an air charter broker that connects customers with licensed direct air carriers to reach unique and popular destinations for business and leisure at a reasonable cost.

At BLADE I worked with a tight product team with stakeholders across business, marketing, and technology, as well as the CEO directly. In my role, I was responsible for designing, prototyping, and specifying solutions to meet the needs of an ambitious and growing startup. In addition to improving user flows and polishing the brand, I created and maintained a design system to bring coherence to the

For more details on my work at BLADE, feel free to contact me.

Unify flows

The BLADE app was redesigned to capture the essence of the brand. The app started as a newsfeed-style list of places you can go, but as the product offering began to diversify a new model was needed.

The redesigned app speaks to the more casual user who is in the earlier stages of the decision making process, providing compelling content to showcase the experience. For the existing customer that has already accepted that urban air mobility is the future, key portions of the app were refined and enhanced to make repeat bookings simple and intuitive.

Explore and more

Flying with BLADE isn’t quite like hailing a private car or finding a room to stay in for a weekend. Whether for business or leisure, the routes and destinations offered up by BLADE are designed to be highly rewarding, and life-changing for some, experiences.

While we focused on the utilitarian aspects of the app as good as ever, the explore tab presented an opportunity to dig into the lavish details of each destination. To that end, the landing pages, product detail pages, and ephemeral programmed media were designed to be flexible spaces where the marketing team could sell the brand and tell a story while staying within a consistent framework to improve conversion.

Better Booking

With a growing number of products, the path to booking a flight started to get complicated. We streamlined the flow and introduced consistent patterns that asked the right questions and presented the right information.

End to end experience

A key component to air travel is access to itineraries, flight alerts, receipts, and other records. The app thus acts as a flight companion, with the flier from beginning to end, and allowing them such essential features as rescheduling or re-booking flights and providing their pilot with an extra tip.

Dark Mode

For environments such as night time flights where the default UI might cause strain on the eyes, varying degrees of dark mode are offered. The darkest mode, called Pitch Black, was crafted to emit the lowest amount of light while remaining legible and maintaining usability standards. Fun fact: the app is quite navigable when wearing aviators.

Design System

My typical approach to establishing design systems doesn’t work so well when every aspect of a product is in flux; the result tends to be rather prescriptive. Rather than shoot from the hip while putting together a styleguide and library, I introduced many low-fidelity concepts to get as much high-level discussion going as possible. Once a direction was established the myriad UI components, interaction patterns, and brand elements became more formalized.

Read more about the BLADE Design System here