Aioli: Reimagining Airline Back Office.
Shift from IT-dependent workflows to self-service tools any airline team could use with confidence.
Role
Lead Designer
Team
PM, 2 Engineers
Scope
Web App, Internal Tooling
Timeline
10 months · Apr 2024 - Jan 2025
why it started
Goal.
Give airline teams the power to configure and launch their entire sales journey fast and confidently.
how it ended
Result.
Setup time dropped 83% with self-service configuration, and WestJet approved the concept pre-development.
What is the Aioli?
Our all-in-one airline admin. The name started as an inside joke (“All-In-One” ) and ended up defining the project.
It also perfectly captured our mission for the product: blending fragmented airline systems into one unified admin tool that helps airline teams manage everything they sell, from onboard snacks and duty-free items to seat upgrades and priority boarding, all in one place.
These sales make up what the aviation industry calls ancillary revenue, a crucial source of profit especially for low-cost airlines.
Who uses Aioli?
From power users to everyone
The system was originally built for our internal configuration team: power users who knew it inside out. When the business shifted to self-service, first-time airline users needed something different.
The self-service challenge
Scaling from internal specialists to hundreds of airline users changed everything. First-time users needed independence, but the existing admin forced them to rely on constant IT support.
Discovery & approach
Where did the old admins fail?
I needed to understand the gaps. What errors occurred most frequently? Where were functions buried? Which business cases forced workarounds?
To answer these questions, I teamed up with operations and customer-success teams to map the broken information hierarchy. We hosted a client forum at Pearson Airport with Porter and WestJet to hear firsthand what airlines needed.
Challenges
Those conversations revealed three critical barriers standing between airlines and self-service success.
Users couldn't find what they needed.
The problem
The menu structure followed backend logic instead of user tasks. The labels were hard to understand and workflows were scattered all over the place. Teams memorized paths through trials and error rather than discovering them intuitively.
My approach
I ran card sorting activities with stakeholders to map their mental models. How did they naturally group functions? What categories felt intuitive? The result drove a complete navigation restructure, organizing features by task flow and naming them using user-friendly language.
Features weren't actually being used.
The problem
Years of development had added checkboxes, fields, and controls to every page. Some were never used. Others were obsolete. Users faced dense interfaces full of options they didn't understand, creating confusion about what they actually needed to configure.
My approach
I partnered with the Product Manager to systematically audit the UI. By challenging every control against actual business needs, we were able to consolidate complex elements and refine the language, resulting in a clearer and more intuitive user interfaces.
How do you design for scenarios that don't exist yet?
The problem
The old system couldn't adapt to new business scenarios. Teams relied on manual workarounds, duplicate SKUs piled up, and entitlement logic was unclear when airlines needed it.
My approach
I mapped the configuration journeys to understand where workflows branched, where they differed, and what patterns held everything together. The result was a modular structure (see diagram above) flexible enough to support new configuration needs without redesigns.
Define once, use everywhere.
At the core of Aioli is a unified product definition. Set up an item once and that single source flows across every channel.
bundle & launch in minutes.
Airline rely on combos to drive sales, but legacy tools couldn't support them. Aioli lets teams bundle products into any combination and sell them as a single item across all channels.
one catalog, infinite variations.
Once products and combos exist, they're grouped into catalogs, the control centre for flexible pricing adjustments and cabin class targeting.
target any flight, control every detail
Catalogs connect to flight plans, completing the loop. Teams can target flights by route, flight number, origin, destination, time of day, or day of week — and allocate inventory in the same place.
Impact beyond the build
The design became the blueprint for future development. In beta testing, configuration teams confirmed an 83% reduction in setup time, what used to take days now took hours.
WestJet's response: “This is exactly what we need. When can this go live? ” And a Senior Product Manager called it “the best, cleanest, most sophisticated design we’ve seen.”
Although full implementation paused during company restructuring, this project proved that strategic design work earns stakeholder trust and delivers measurable value — before a single line of production code.