My Role:
Business/Functional Analyst
UX Designer
Engineer
Scope:
12 weeks
5 members
Project Overview
Merlion Airline System is an enterprise system for an Airline company, which allows Airline company using a single platform to Manage fleet acquisition, route planning, flight scheduling and flight maintenance
Coordinate among ground crews, cabin crews, maintenance crews to conduct flight safely and efficiently
Manage external customers booking flights, check-in, customer relationship management
Revenue model to price the seats and collaborate with other airline for code sharing flight to maximize the revenue
Design Process
During the initial design phase, Our team studied various airlines for reference and eventually identify 8 standard core business processes of airline operation that Merlion Airline System should cover:
Overall system breakdown
System Break Down (Overall Project Scope)
In this case study, I will take A.6 Departure Control Subsystem as an example to illustrate the design and development process. I was in charge of analysing A.6 business and system requirements, designing the desktop website and mobile website and developed those to live.
Departure Control Subsystem
Customer Online Booking / Check-In System
Before doing this project, I am just an ordinary passenger. This is the first time I am thinking from Airline company’s perspective to develop an enterprise system. In order to fully understand the business objectives, I start the design process with Business Analysis.
Business Anslysis
First, I identified the main objectives for this departure control subsystem is to
Provide multiple check-in options, which reduces queuing time, saves service manpower and increases customer’s satisfaction.
Manage luggage for easy tracking.
Ensure effective boarding.
Inside this system, customers should have multiple check-in options including online check-in before the departure of the flight or counter check-in after arriving at the airport.
Passenger check-in at counter
If passengers check-in at counter, passengers approach the counter to check in after arriving at the airport. The counter staff verifies the passenger’s PNR (passenger name record) validation. If the passenger has valid PNR, then counter staff will use DCS (Departure Control System) to allocate seats and baggage for the passenger. After the entire process is completed, the counter will generate the boarding pass using DCS. The diagram below clearly shows the overall sequence and parties that have been involved for this process.
As a flight passenger, when I check in at airline counter, I don’t fully understand what is happening when the ground crew member scan my passport. After my analysis, I understand that scanning passport actually validate passenger’s name with the PNR system, which is standardized by International's Air Transport Association. Based on the above research and analysis, I draw the diagram between different stakeholders.
Passenger check-in online
If passengers check in online without having any luggage. They should login in Merlion Airline website to perform online check-in. Online check-in can only be performed 48 hours in advance before the reserved trip. Passengers will select seats and DCS will generate electric boarding passes.The diagram below clearly shows the overall sequence and parties that have been involved for this process.
After understanding the interaction between different stakeholders, I started functional analysis to design what are the functionalities of this project in order to achieve business objectives.
System Analysis
Considering the various functionalities, DCS is split into three modules: check-in management, baggage management and boarding management.
Check-in Management Module
This module supports the entire check-in process, including searching for PNR, selecting seat, checking in baggage and other provisional tasks.
Baggage Management Module
This module is to provide baggage tracking and management. In spite that baggage is associated with the owning passenger, the management of baggage is handled separately from the passenger. Functions in this module include updating baggage weight, entering baggage transportation information and tagging baggage. Baggage will be tracked along the trip and its transportation information will be updated when scanning at each intermediate transit point.
Boarding Management Module
This module is used for facilitating boarding process. Functions are associated with the scanning of boarding pass/boarding QR code and updating of flight information.
After business and system analysis, I summarized the overall functionality table for the Departure control system (left) and drew use case diagrams (right) to clearly indicate how were users and system interact with each other.
After analyzing all the detail requirements, we had a team meeting to put together all the analyzing details and planned for design and development phase of the project. However, one of our team members was not able to provide his analysis on time. As the delaying of the analysing phases may cause the incompletion of the whole project, some other members wanted to quit the class and leave the team. The upset and mistrust spread across the team during that time.
At one night, after a long team meeting day, I noticed the tension between that guy and the rest of the team members, so I gathered all the team members and suggested to take a break and ate supper together. There, I clearly stated the problem we were facing and suggested team to work together to cover some business analysis parts that the person was not familiar with. “Everyone has his own skills, as a team we could contribute our strength and help others to overcome the difficulties together. Let’s try another 3 days for catching up all these analysis that we are currently behind.” I said to all my team members and showed them the updated plan for analysing tasks. All team members agreed with my suggestions and we continued for another 3 days. In fact, we survived the rest of the project and worked together with each other very well. Until now, I still appreciate that time when team members work together to solve the problem together and we finished our project successfully.
During the design and implementation phase, I started to wireframe the basic screens and workflow for the departure control system. Based on the analyzed information and users feedbacks I made the changes throughout the project. I learned “user centered design” during the users feedback session. My initial design of deleting action is: if user click on delete, it will delete the entry instantly. After receiving a quite a number of users suggestions saying that they accidentally delete things they are not supposed to delete, I realized using double confirmation (pop up window) to ask users if they confirm to delete the entry can actually eliminate these human errors. This is the first time I realized design affect a lot in people’s experience. I was trained as an engineer to make the function explicit and direct. Throughout users’ feedback, I recognized functionality is only one aspect of the product. Thinking about user’s need and design and implement what users want is much more important in the product development life cycle. This project is the starting point for me to understand user experience and appreciate the importance of user experience.
Initial Sketch:
Design Principle
Some design principles we used for our project
System Tip
In order to provide understandable and clear system usage, Merlion Airline System designed system tips to help users with clear instruction. When a request is successfully performed, a successful tip will be given to user. Besides, if the user performs a function incorrectly, the error feedback is displayed. For example, an error tip will be shown if a user did not fill in a required field. Hence, users will be able to know the reasons of errors and modify requests or seek for help in certain area.
System Theme
Merlion Airline System has a color theme as a combination of sapphire, medium yellow, lighter blue and white. These colors indicate a professional and clam impression that Merlion Airline aims to present to both its customers and its employees. Besides, sapphire color represents the premium and high-level services that Merlion Airline provides. The theme is implemented to entire system, which provides users with UI consistency.
User Friendliness
As one of the most important system design principle, user friendliness presents in every detail of Merlion Airline System.
For example, input masks are provided to help with correct user input. Besides, data sorting and filtering supports user to search for, use and analyze data efficiently. In addition, the use of icon in some cases help efficient work of users, since the indicative icons saves the time of users in finding a function.
Moreover, in order to help users to perform analysis, Merlion Airline System implements multiple data filters include sliders, check boxes, spinner, so on and so forth. Hence, user spend less time on searching required data using suitable methods.
Customized Error Page
Merlion Airline System uses customized error page to replace track back message. Hence, the code error will not be exposed to users. Users will be able to understand the situation is a server error and contact the technical support to report the error observed.
Final Deliverable
The final deliverables allow Merlion Airline system to provide services for different stakeholders:
For Customers:
Flight booking,Check in
Customer Relationship Management
For Airline Employees:
Employee Management
Bidding for working shift module
For Flight and Airline Company:
Coordinate flight crew, ground crew, maintenance staff and other supporting roles to safely and efficiently conduct flights.
Revenue management and seats distribution with other Airlines (sharing flight code)
Departure control system
The final deliverables can be access from both on Desktop and Mobile website
Examples of some screenshots from final deliverables
Key Learning
Building up Airline enterprise system is a very complex. From the project, I practiced my analytic skills on topics that I have zero knowledge before. My initial knowledge of Airline system is only about purchasing Airline tickets, however, throughout this project, I understand how different systems work together with each other and the importance of assuring the flight, the travelers and the crew members perform their tasks.
Besides, the project opened a door for me of experience design. I realized the importance of customer centric design and to create something from users need perspective rather than from an engineering perspective.
Last but not least, I had a great time working with my team members. Although team conflict is inevitable, my role of offering help when team member encounters problem and encouraging the team to work together when there is difficulty, helps the team to achieve these fantastic results.
Future Development
With the improvement of my design skills, I plan to further retouch on this project with focus on “Human Centered Design”. I decide to do more rounds of user interviews and iterations for customer facing websites to better serve customers’ needs.
Full Project: GitHub