flytalk

Objective: Enhance the traveler’s end-to-end experience.

Contributions: Project Management, User Research, Sketching, Wireframes, Prototyping
Client: Logica Service Design Lab
Team Size: 5 MCHI Students, 2 Client Sponsors
Project Duration: 9 months
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Sencha API, Sketching
Methods: 7 Exploratory, 3 Generation, 4 Evaluation

Overview:

Traveling through airports can be stressful and unrewarding experience. Constant gate changes, lack of, or over abundance of information, and varying procedures all contribute to a complex and overwhelming challenge just to make it to your destination. Airports also lack the information to make the best decisions to ease the traveler’s pain points.

Results:

Flytalk is a mobile application primarily used by travelers while going through the airport. Consolidating itinerary, maps, services, customized procedural information, and questions & answers allows travelers to be informed but not overwhelmed. Our design goal was “the right information at the right time.”

Selected Features:

Personalized Help: Passengers can post questions to airport officials, airline officials, and other travelers in their flight. Often travelers have these questions where it isn’t convenient to seek out an information desk. We also discovered that many travelers will accept answers from other travelers. This feature also allows travelers to interact with each other to create a connection.

Itinerary List & Map: Flytalk breaks down the long process of getting from check-in to destination by identifying the touchpoints a traveler needs to go through to get from check-in to final destination. Each step in the process has procedural information and approximate wait times so the traveler has an expectation of what the trip will be like. Itinerary also includes a final touchpoint of traveling to final destination which integrates google map API for transit options.

Spare Time: Calculating approximate spare time allows the traveler to make better decisions where to spend their time. Spare time is calculated based on the aggregate time it takes to get through all of the touch points from check in to gate. Research showed travelers would get to the gate with only a few minutes to spare and other times they would get there with hours to spare and not know where they could spend their time.

Services: Rushing through an airport travelers aren’t aware of what services (i.e. food, retail, accessibility) are available and where they are. Flytalk tackles this in two ways by providing a list of services sortable by distance and by putting the services on the map. This allows the traveler to know what lies beyond a touchpoint of no return. Services are a combination of authentic and crowdsourced information.

Process:

Exploratory Phase: There were seven methods utilized: guided storytelling, retrospective interviews, diary studies, personal inventory, fly-on-the-wall, make tools, and bodystorming. These methods were conducted over three airports, Madeira, Lisbon, and Amsterdam Schippol. Additionally several of these methods were conducted in tourist areas and diary studies were conducted remotely over three continents. In total we worked with 63 different participants to collect their traveling experiences.

Synthesis and Generation phase: Affinity, flow, and sequence models were pervasive in our sense making and ideation process. Writing stories of the traveler’s experience gave us insight into how they perceive the trip. Personas, scenarios, and interaction relabeling were used to generate over 100 ideas. From those ideas we applied constraints of technological feasibility, client goals, and user goals to consolidate and eliminate down 3 big ideas. Participatory design was utilized to validate, improve, and narrow to one solution.

Evaluation Phase: We made three major iterations along with additional minor evaluation checks in between. Beginning with paper prototyping in the lab we were able to refine the flow and structure of our application. Our prototype was developed using Sencha API for the iPhone and we utilized mock data. The next two iterations were in Madeira Airport with real travelers as we walked them through several scenarios to test usability and intuitiveness of the application.