PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Challenge
Design a mobile solution that simplifies airport navigation for non-frequent travelers, providing real-time guidance from entry to boarding. The app will offer flight-based maps, TSA wait times, check-in assistance, luggage tracking, and nearby amenities for a seamless journey.
Opportunity
Enhance the airport experience for non-frequent travelers by reducing stress and uncertainty through a smart mobile solution. By integrating real-time navigation, wait times, and personalized recommendations, the app can improve efficiency, increase traveler confidence, and create new engagement opportunities for airport services and businesses.
Process
Research & Planning
Conducted user research through interviews and surveys with non-frequent travelers to understand their pain points and challenges at airports. Identified key issues such as difficulty navigating terminals, uncertainty about TSA wait times, and lack of real-time updates on gate changes and nearby services.
Design & Prototyping
Created lo-fi wireframes and turned them into hi-fi mockups after conducting user testing. Iteratively refined the app based on usability testing, focusing on intuitive navigation, clear real-time updates, and accessibility to essential travel information.
Development & Implementation
Utilized agile methodologies to build the app, prioritizing essential features such as personalized gate navigation, TSA and check-in tracking, luggage drop-off reminders, and interactive maps showing dining and entertainment options.
Testing & Optimization
Conducted usability testing with travelers to validate the design. Gathered feedback through testing and continuously optimized the app based on real-world user experiences, ensuring efficiency, clarity, and seamless airport navigation.
Painpoints at an airport
A journey map was created that showed the route a traveler would take when they enter the airport to board their airplane. This was created to identify the main pain points at each stage of the journey and possible mitigations to solve those issues.
RESEARCH
The Competition
A comparative analysis was conducted for 4 competitor apps. These apps were chosen based on the user reviews in the app store and the frequency of use. Identifying the strengths of the app would help identify possible opportunities for features to be included in the app. At the same time, the weaknesses will help identify possible gaps in the app and broaden the design space to ideate features that can help solve those problems.
Asking the Customers
Interviews were conducted with the purpose of gathering insights from potential infrequence travelers to identify key features that would enhance the usability and effectiveness of an airport guide app. The following takeaways were concluded:
Features to include
From the user journey, the secondary research and the user interviews, I was able to list down a list of features that would help ease the airport navigation process through the mobile app. These include the following:
Real-time wait line tracking system
Using API integrations to track passenger flow and approximate wait times at various airport processes
Interactive map
A clear and intuitive map that would guide the user to their gate or any other location they are willing to go at the airport
Restaurants, entertainment, and lounge locator
Shows the location and status of restaurants, lounges, and other entertainment amenities at the airport
Flight tracker
Sends user push notifications about constant changes/updates to their flight, saves their e-boarding pass, notify about delays, and track their flight in real-time
real-time analytics
Real-time analytics in the aviation industry
In today’s fast-paced world, the aviation industry plays a crucial role in connecting people across the world. Airports rely heavily on real-time analytics to ensure seamless operations and passenger satisfaction. Real-time analytics can be a game-changer, by not only providing airport authorities valuable insights to enhance efficiency but also improving the overall passenger experience by providing them with updated data.
When it comes to gathering real-time information into an app, APIs (Application Programming Interface) are the big players. One such API that can be integrated into the app is the Aviation Edge Airport Schedules API. It provides flight schedules and timetables of all airports and airlines around the world and maintains them in a central database that can be accessible with a personal API key.
real-time analytics
Reducing security wait times
Security screening is the number one stressor for travelers, accounting for 36% of negative emotions along the journey according to SITA’s The Future is Connected 2016 report. Airlines and airports are investing in technology to improve the travel process, and have succeeded at points along the journey. Still, there is a self-service technology gap when it comes to passenger security screening.
SITA’s Day of Operations BI (Business Intelligence) solution gives airports a global view of all facets of operations – including where passengers wait, walk, and dwell. It supports airport planning by gathering data in real-time, compiling historical data, and making predictive analyses. Sensors measure passenger devices as they go by, keeping accurate tallies of foot traffic. SITA reports that 95 percent of airline passengers carry at least one personal electronic device when they fly, which helps to make these counts reliable.
SITA says its Day of Operations technology, including passenger movement data gathered by sensors, has proven to improve efficiency at security. SITA QueueAnalyzer now gives the airport a real-time view of TSA checkpoints, enabling rapid response to unexpected conditions. It also provides historical wait-time data to establish wait-time profiles for different times of the day, days of the week, and seasons,” says Matthys Serfontein, president of SITA Airport Solutions.
prototyping
Mid-Fidelity Mockups
Testing design
User Testing
The next step was conducting usability testing with the mid-fis to evaluate the app’s usability, navigation, and user-friendliness.
Takeaways:
Participants were able to perform the tasks efficiently and took no more than 7 seconds to carry out the task.
Participants said it was easy to navigate between pages and figure out what options would each page entail.
One participant said the overall navigability of the app was “very smooth and clear”
prototyping
Final Design Wireframes
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