Claim Flow Redesign

Delta Air Lines pilots used the ACE mobile app to report suspected contract violations to their union (our client).

Delta Pilots Union admins would review the reports, get more info from the pilots, and, if a violation had occurred, file a claim on the pilot’s behalf.

Claims were validated internally and if still considered valid, submitted to the company. The company process was out of our sight, but their decision and any back pay for the pilots was reported back into ACE, which notified the pilots and last union admin who worked on the claim.

Union admins spent most of their day in this part of ACE, so it was crucial that it worked well.

The first draft

Before I was hired, the team built a product based on the union’s spec:

• 1 pilot per report
• 1 report per claim
• 1 violation per claim

By the time I joined the team, the spec had changed to require:

• 1 or more reports per claim
• 1 or more violations per claim
• Additional pilots who didn’t file a claim

The client had also conflated the terms ‘reports’ and ‘claims’, which got baked into the early design. They were two distinct objects:

1. Report
   • Filed by a single pilot or created on one’s behalf by a union admin
   • Reviewed by the union
   • Basic metadata:
     • Date created
     • Status
     • Category of violation
     • Pilot description
     • Pilot images (photos, screenshots, etc.)
2. Claim
   • Create by union admins on behalf of pilots
   • Contained 1 or more reports
   • Specified 1 or more contract violations
   • Went through an internal approval process
   • If approved internally:
     • Submitted to the company
     • Approved or denied by the company
     • Update to save the result details
   • Basic metadata:
     • Date created
     • Status
     • Union description of the incident
     • Hours of pay owed the pilot(s)
     • Result of claim (approved/denied, pay recovered if approved, etc.)

Designing the original UI without seeing these as two discrete objects resulted in a quirky UI that needed a redesign.

Screens

Results of redesign

Our changes had cascading positive effects:

• Reduced the union’s claim processing time by 33% YOY, and 53% over 2022
• Faster processing helped the union work through the backlog of pilot reports
• Faster response to pilots’ reports improved their view of ACE

It also brought the most-used area of the admin up the speed with other areas of the app.

By the end of 5S’s relationship with the Delta pilots union, the company was also using ACE to process claims and preferred it over their previous system.