Reimagined Journeys

Innovating Air New Zealand's customer and operational digital experiences
Role Overview
I was a Senior User Experience Strategist and Designer in the Air NZ User Experience team, responsible for designing innovative and delightful travel experiences for Air New Zealand customers and operational crew. I helped create alignment around product visions, business opportunities and authentic user needs through customer insights analysis, design thinking and visual concepts.
My Responsibilities
• Translated user needs, business goals, and design strategy into clear, value-driven product visions
• Conducted in-depth product research and analysis to uncover strategic opportunities and shape design direction
• Facilitated customer journey mapping, ideation workshops, and user-centred design sessions to align cross-functional teams
• Delivered core UX outputs including personas, journey maps, information architecture, wireframes, and interactive prototypes
• Championed collaboration across disciplines, working closely with product managers, engineers, and data scientistsLeveraged quantitative and qualitative insights to inform design decisions and influence product roadmaps
• Enabled design at scale through the development of standardized design systems across multiple digital products
• Led recruitment, interviews, and mentorship for Air New Zealand’s digital internship programme for three consecutive years
In my three years at Air New Zealand, I conducted UX strategy, research and design for a wide-range of digital customer products such as global websites, digital travel retail, digital marketing communications, Grabaseat mobile app, flights delays/disruption and the Oscar AI chatbot. I also had the opportunity to design and facilitate numerous co-design workshops to create digital experience visions for operational staff, such as Air NZ's 3000 cabin crew and 1000 aircraft engineering crew.

The role allowed me to develop my skill-set as a UX practitioner, by understanding how to apply design methodology, frameworks and processes to different business situation. In each project, I spent time and energy on understanding the context and environments the various teams operated in and the challenges they faced. This guided greater understanding of how design could possibly help teams to visualise a more ideal experience for their intended users (whether it be customer or operational crew).

I found many projects at Air New Zealand incredibly rewarding, mainly because it allowed me to join teams I would have otherwise never had the opportunity to interact with. From cabin crew to aircraft engineers, contact centre to koru lounge staff, commercial sales to Airpoints loyalty marketers. Each project presented unique situations for me to learn about the fundamentals of each Air New Zealand unit, and seek to provide the best possible user-centered solutions to their problems.
Air New Zealand
UX Team Lead
Apr 2016 – Mar 2019
ALLEN SW HUANG © 2025
LINKEDINInstagramPINTEREST