Shopping Results
Alaska Airlines // 2014
In 2014, Alaska Airlines introduced an interim visual refresh ahead of the larger brand redesign that would follow in 2015. As the visual designer on the e-commerce team, I partnered closely with UX to redesign the flight shopping results experience and bring the new visual direction into one of Alaska's most important transactional flows.
The underlying experience had to communicate a lot at once: flight times and routes, pricing, seating tiers, availability, and different combinations of itinerary information. My role was to take the UX structure and turn it into a clear, scannable interface—using typography, color, spacing, and hierarchy to help customers compare their options without adding more complexity.
Extending a brand system for the web
One of the more interesting challenges came from the interim brand palette itself. The new colors had been defined at the brand level, but there were no accompanying tints for use across a complex digital interface.
That became an accessibility problem. The shopping experience needed variations of key brand colors to distinguish seating tiers, states, and supporting information while still meeting WCAG 2.0 contrast requirements. I developed and tested additional tints from the new palette, effectively extending the interim visual system where the existing brand guidance didn't account for the needs of the product.
Shipping without formal user testing
The project moved quickly, and there wasn't time in the schedule for formal usability testing before launch. Instead, the work was refined through regular reviews with UX and the broader Alaska e-commerce team, including creative, content, development, and other stakeholders. The UX team was particularly receptive to how the visual treatment brought structure and clarity to a dense shopping experience.
The redesigned results page launched in Winter 2014 and served as an interim experience before Alaska introduced its larger rebrand the following year.
What we learned
The work also exposed something useful beyond the shopping results page itself: a brand palette isn't necessarily a usable digital color system.
For the broader e-commerce team, the project reinforced the importance of validating not only primary brand colors for accessibility, but also the tints, states, and variations those colors will need once they're applied to real product interfaces. That lesson became especially relevant as Alaska moved toward its more comprehensive 2015 rebrand.