Case study · SugarBox Networks × AirAsia · 2022

In-flight entertainment and shopping for AirAsia

Designing the journey that let the SugarBox app and network run as a white-labelled service — AIRFLIX — on board AirAsia flights, from boarding until deboarding.

Role: Director of Design
Year: 2022
Industry: Hyperlocal content delivery network
Client: AirAsia
Product: AIRFLIX by SugarBox

AIRFLIX by SugarBox app screens on phones

01 · Overview

The design brief

Design a customer journey and experience that lets the SugarBox app and network run as a white-labelled service on AirAsia flights.

Service icons: Food, Movies, TV Shows, Shop, Cabs, Games, Podcast — Seven services had to run in an airline environment: food, movies, TV shows, shopping, cabs, games and podcasts.

My role — defining the experience

Worked with the heads of business, product and engineering to align long-term goals, business objectives and current problems, and defined the UX strategy that became the roadmap, user stories and feature definitions.

Design direction

Directed the team to an end-to-end journey for a user boarding a flight, through to leaving the environment at deboarding.

02 · Background

What is SugarBox Network?

A first-of-its-kind hyperlocal content delivery network: data servers hosting partner movies, games, TV, music and e-commerce, built for places where the internet is bad or missing.

Users connect through a Wi-Fi zone called SugarBox WiFi and get everything hosted by the app’s partners.

Watch

Movies and TV shows from our content partner, Zee5.

Shop

D2C brands like Man Matters, Bolt and Mulmul.

Order food

From AirAsia’s on-board food catalogue.

Pay

Tata Neu coins, Amazon Pay, Simpl and Pay to Crew.

Product features

Area	What it had to do
Network	Access the SugarBox network and its content in a completely disconnected environment
OTT, podcasts & music	Stream and download to the user’s device, with offline DRM licensing
E-commerce	Categories, brands and products, with an end-to-end shopping journey
Payments	Tata Neu coins, Amazon Pay, Simpl and Pay to Crew

03 · Problems

Built for no internet, but needing it everywhere

Play Store listing for the SugarBox app — Install — needs internet to download the native app

Onboarding screen asking for location — Location — needs internet to find hyperlocal content

Payment method screen — Payments — needs internet to link a wallet the first time

Internet dependency across the whole journey contradicted the value proposition — a network you can use in no-internet zones.
Onboarding to content was still too long, because of the old solution’s tech constraints; analytics showed massive drop-offs.
Two journeys — for metro users with data and without — meant too many variables and an inconsistent experience.

04 · Research

Heuristic evaluation of the previous experience

A thorough evaluation of the major flows, combined with what we’d learned from usability testing in the live environment, gave us the experience issues and their fixes.

Heuristic evaluation flow map with annotated phone screens

05 · Research

Learnings from on-ground usability testing

Internet at metro points of interest is inconsistent, so OTP login and online payments won’t work.
Internet-dependent cases need a backhaul — a mobile SIM in the edge servers for OTP, wallet linking and payments.
On SugarBox WiFi, sideloading partner apps like Zee5 isn’t possible on iOS — we’d lose that whole user base.
Many installations are underground, with no mobile network at all.