Case Study: British Airways improves accessibility and consistency with Leighton’s BAgel design system

British Airways improves accessibility by 39% with Leighton

British Airways faced the challenge of maintaining a consistent, accessible, and high-quality user experience across its vast and complex digital estate, which included numerous websites, apps, and kiosks. Previous attempts to implement a design system had resulted in fragmented adoption, inconsistent accessibility, and increased technical debt. The airline partnered with vendor Leighton to evolve its global experience language, known as BAgel, into a widely adopted and scalable design system.

Leighton embedded experts to collaboratively build and implement the BAgel design system, engineering accessibility directly into each component and establishing best practices. The solution was widely adopted, used by over 100 designers and developers across more than 30 projects. This led to a 39% improvement in the customer's accessibility benchmark score, significant reductions in duplication and rework, and 82% of surveyed employees reporting increased efficiency in their work.

British Airways