UX & Service Designer, Crew Planning - easyJet Airlines

When it comes to innovation and achievement there are few organisations with a better track record than us. Over the last 24 years, we have changed the way people travel, leading the way in the short haul airline market across the UK and Europe. With a growing fleet of over 300 aircraft, annual passenger numbers in excess of 85 million and an unparalleled network of over 1,000 routes, our aim is to make travel easy and affordable for our customers. Then it’s our people and passion which sets us apart. Highly talented, forward thinking people with a real sense of fun. We are generation easyJet, joined together by our “Orange Spirit”.

JOB PURPOSE

Crew pairing and rostering sits at the centre of the airline. It determines how thousands of pilots and cabin crew are paired into flying duties and rostered across the network, and it drives crew productivity, operational resilience, cost and crew lifestyle in equal measure. easyJet is replacing its legacy crew planning estate with a market-leading commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) crew optimisation product, and the purpose of this role is to own the planner and crew planning experience through that transition and into run.

This is not a blank-canvas screen design role. On a configured COTS optimisation product the experience is largely determined by decisions that are easy to make by accident; how work is organised in the planner workspace, how much of the solution a planner can see and influence, how rules are expressed and where discretion sits, what the optimiser surfaces at the point of decision, and how a roster reaches a crew member. Our designer will make those decisions deliberately, evidence them with research, and be able to hold their own in a conversation about rule intent, solution quality and trade-offs with planners, optimisation engineers and the vendor.

The successful individual will be an experienced UX and service designer who is comfortable designing for expert users who know the domain better than they do, comfortable working inside the constraints of someone else’s product, and able to move between a service blueprint, an information architecture and a working prototype at the pace of delivery.

JOB ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Part of the Crew Pairing and Rostering product team within Airline Operations Technology,

• Own the end-to-end experience across pairing, rostering, publication and in-month roster management; and the crew-facing experience of receiving, understanding and requesting changes to a roster.

• Lead service design and journey work; map current and target-state journeys across the crew planning value chain, including the handoffs into crew control, training, absence and payroll, and design out the workarounds, offline spreadsheets and re-keying that exist today.

• Own the information architecture of the planner workspace; what a planner sees first, how they move between the schedule, the solution, the exception queue and the rules, and how data-dense views remain readable under operational pressure.

• Translate the service design into product configuration choices — views, workflows, defaults, permissions and terminology — and make the reasoning behind each choice explicit and reviewable rather than buried in a configuration workbook.

• Work with the pairing and rostering SMEs, rules governance and the solution lead to make rule choices and their trade-offs visible; separate what is regulatory (EASA FTL), what is contractual (crew agreements) and what is discretionary, and design how planners see the cost and consequence of the discretionary choices.

• Design the optimiser experience; how a planner sets up and scopes a run, understands the objectives and penalties behind a solution, compares candidate solutions, interprets infeasibility, and decides when to accept, re-run or intervene by hand. Trust in optimiser output has to be designed for, not assumed.

• Drive user research and design validation with a small, expert user population through contextual enquiry, observation of live planning cycles, and usability testing of configured product ahead of parallel run.

• Name and design for the behavioural delta between the legacy estate and the new product, so differences in planner workflow surface in design rather than in parallel run or go-live.

• Feed the product adoption plan; supply the journeys, walkthroughs and design artefacts that underpin training needs analysis, comms and business change, and support the definition of process and procedure updates.

• Work with QA engineers and the solution lead on functional and regression test design, ensuring test coverage reflects real planner journeys and not just feature behaviour.

• Ensure designs meet accessibility standards and remain consistent and on-brand across the crew planning and crew-facing surfaces.

• Work closely with a wide stakeholder group including the Product Manager, Tech Lead/Architect, Data, engineers, delivery lead, pairing, rostering and training SMEs, business change, Crew and OS&P leadership, and the vendor’s design and configuration teams.

COMPETENCIES

• Ownership and Delivery – Has a clear focus to deliver results, works to targets and is comfortable reviewing progress and adapting their plans accordingly. Is a team player, motivating themselves and the rest of the team.

• Business Performance - Understands changes to business and external environment. Is cost conscious and understands the longer term strategy and implications of decisions.

• Building Relationships - Expresses ideas confidently and clearly. Builds positive and constructive relationships, while supporting others.

• Innovation and Change - Is open to new ways of doing things and questions existing approaches. Is open to change and sees change as an opportunity. Comfortable working in a dynamic and ambiguous environment.