FACT: Flight Attendant Connection Tool
Project Overview
The Inflight Experience department of Frontier Airlines is responsible for managing the Flight Attendants of the airline. They brought me onto their team looking to update their communications to be more effective and aligned with the Frontier brand.
Role: Designer of Communication and Branding
Team: As the department's sole intern and designer, I reported directly to the V.P. of Inflight Experience.
The Challenge: When I arrived at Frontier, ongoing union negotiations and layover model changes had left the relationship between the airline and its Flight Attendants deeply strained — and the inflight service was reflecting it. Frontier needed to find a way to rebuild that relationship before the passenger experience suffered any further.
Timeline: 5 months
Age: 20-60+
Flight Attendants make up over 50% of the Frontier Airlines work force.
Flight Attendants are unionized, which creates an inherently adversarial dynamic between them and the company — one that becomes especially pronounced during contract negotiations.
Flight Attendants are primarily self-managing. They can go months without interacting with their supervisors and they build their own schedules, making them an extremely independent workforce.
The Users: Flight Attendants
Methods: Community observation · Contextual inquiry · User interviews
300+ hours of immersion across 20 flights · 5 bases · 4 crew rooms · Recurrent & initial training · 10+ crew interviews (FAs, new hires, reserve crews, Inflight Leadership)
Key Themes:
Disenfranchisement — FAs have little to no loyalty to the Frontier brand. Many expressed embarrassment telling others where they work.
Communication breakdown — Most FAs get their information through word of mouth, fueling false rumors. Company resources exist, but FAs struggle to find anything relevant to them within it.
Core Pain Points: Brand disenfranchisement · Lack of transparent communication · Critical gaps in the FA communication journey
Research & Synthesis
Communication Journey Map
I mapped every standardized touchpoint between the company and its Flight Attendants — emails, documents, events, phone calls, and texts — resulting in 328 documented points of contact with samples of each.
The journey map revealed a significant imbalance: 60% of all unique communication happens before a Flight Attendant's first day of work, exposing major gaps in how the company supports FAs throughout the rest of their career.
FACT Before
FACT is a knowledge base that was launched in 2020 during the pandemic and is constantly updated and the most reliable source for FA logistical questions. The problem: most FAs I interviewed didn't use it. The interface was uninviting and difficult to navigate, and because of that, FAs had little confidence in the product before they even searched for anything.
Design Goals
Improve the visual appearance of FACT to increase its perceived credibility and give FAs more confidence in the product.
Modernize the interface and align it more closely with the Frontier brand to make it feel like a resource worth trusting.
Incentivize FAs to actually use FACT — because the content is already there and incredibly well maintained, it just needed a design that reflected that.
Final Design
I researched other knowledge base websites to understand how to make large amounts of information feel accessible rather than overwhelming. I used those insights to design an interface that was more visually appealing and easier to navigate — the goal being that FAs would actually want to use it, not just tolerate it.
Every design decision was made with the Frontier brand guidelines in mind, including designing an entirely new logo for FACT. I used a combination of the destination pin icon and the Flight Attendant wings. Both symbols carry real meaning for Flight Attendants, and bringing them together gave FACT its own identity within the Frontier ecosystem.
Conclusion
Because the inflight department didn't have a developer on staff, I was responsible for implementing the designs myself. My HTML and CSS were a little rusty going in, but I ended up genuinely enjoying the development stage — there was something deeply satisfying about watching the website come to life knowing the final product would match my vision exactly.
This was a solo project from start to finish: research, proposal, design, and development. That came with its challenges, but I walked away proud of what I was able to accomplish on my own. I'll always prefer collaborating with a team, but this project proved to me that I don't need one to produce work I'm proud of.