Type: Group Client Project

Duration: 10 weeks (09/2020 - 11/2020)

Overview

One of the top concerns reported by both IATA data and user research conducted by our team was the fear of contracting COVID-19 when in a crowded space throughout their airport journey. In particular, we noticed that a subset of travelers, those who would only travel for emergencies, were the most anxious about crowding during their airport journey. For this reason, our team concluded that our product opportunity is to reduce crowd-based anxiety among emergency reasoned airport travelers.

Final Design

Design Process

01. Identify Design Opportunity

Our initial problem statement is very broad, we collaborated with TU-Delft and SUTD to improve air travelers airport travel experience during COVID-19. As we started our research, we thought users who loved to travel would want to bring back the social element of travel. Through our user research we found that leisure travelers tended to avoid flying during COVID-19 because of fear and anxiety around crowded areas to, from, and within the airport. Users noted increased anxiety around their airport experience. We began to focus on reducing anxiety, information sharing and community building, rather than the social element of traveling.

Preliminary User Research

We conducted initial user interviews with 4 recent travelers to understand their journey and pain points. Due to COVID-19, I conducted interview through online meeting.

I also asked some travelers to take photos of the SFO airport to help us to better understand the real situation of the airport during the COVID-19 period.

User Journey

Based on preliminary user interviews, I made user journey map

Opportunity

We elected to focus on reducing stress caused by crowding among travelers, as these were two common themes gathered from our user research. We narrowed our opportunity by defining our target user as emergency-reason travelers. We defined emergency-reason travelers as a group of individuals who are concerned enough about COVID and their personal safety that they have decided not to fly, but for some external reason are being forced to travel. Emergencies could include family illness, immigration or visa issues, pressing work concerns or legal matters. We focused on this population because they are likely to have a high level of stress regarding COVID and the airport experience. We further narrowed the scope of our opportunity by focusing on the boarding process. Boarding was identified as a key area of crowded and no social distancing concern among travelers. Thus, our product opportunity is

02. Understanding and Analysis

During this phase, we employed additional one-on-one interviews, creating stakeholder maps, empathy maps, positioning maps and personas, community based participatory research, as well as online research to better understand the problem and opportunity.

We interviewed passengers that have already traveled, both for non-emergency related and emergency related reasons, as well as employees that work at the airport. We asked the passengers that have flown already to tell us about their journey through the airport, and report any pain points they could remember, which we then used to create customer journey and empathy maps.

Key Stakeholders

The high-level spectrum of stakeholders include airport owners, service contractors, travel dependent cities, airport staff, and anyone traveling.

We used stakeholder map to see what kind of people we could potentially impact the most. We identified key stakeholders as airport owners, airline companies, flight crew, and emergency travelers.

Empathy Maps & User Personas

User Research Insights

Key Competitors

Competitors Positioning Map

Main Product Requirements

After all the analysis, we listed 50 product requirements. We discussed and selected five requirements that we felt were key to creating a successful solution, which combines all of the major requirements.

The product must:

Provide an aspect of psychological safety

Be easy to use

Provide complete and accurate information in order to give the user a feeling of knowledge and informed decision making

Be usable and accessible for all populations

Be safe for users and surrounding populations

03. Conceptualize and Ideation

Our team began generating ideas for our specific POG which was: Reducing crowd-based anxiety among emergency-reason airport travelers during onboarding. We began by generating 10 concepts individually using design methods like design heuristics, biomimicry, and visual brainstorming. Once we had 10 ideas each, we got together as a team and generated additional concepts using design methods such as brainwriting and clustering.

After generating approximately 90 concepts through individual brainstorming and brainwriting, we conducted concept selection. Team members began by combining or eliminating redundant ideas. This process revealed that most concepts fit within ten thematic clusters. Creating these clusters allowed us to visualize our concept spaces and eliminate clusters that were not suitable for our POG.

We mapped the remaining 33 concepts on a 2x2 matrix. The vertical axis of the graph ranges from personal to community. This evaluates whether the concept works for an individual user or if it targets a larger community. The horizontal axis evaluates whether the concept generates physical or psychological safety for the user. We identified our target range as the center of the upper half of the graph.

There were 10 concepts that fell within the target area of our 2x2 matrix. These concepts were then evaluated using a weighted matrix, we re-evaluated final 4 concepts and conducted a quick round of user research to people who travel recently to see their responses and feedback. Direct user feedback provides user perspectives which help us make more desirable decisions.

Our final concept is the Lanyard Pager, which will hang on the lanyard and allow users to maintain distance while lining up to board and enter the plane. It will vibrate and light up when users are close to one another to alert the user to step away until it stops providing feedback and users are at 6ft distance from one another.

04. Iteration and Realize

Lo-Fi Prototype

Mid-Fi Prototype

Final Design

Impact

05. Reflection

Future Direction

As with any design, further research and development can create an improved and more beneficial product. Insight is needed on the impacts of Iris in an airport setting, and user feedback on a larger scale would uncover potential issues. Future development of this project falls in three broad categories: physical production, software development, and system design. Testing and user feedback are core steps in each of these processes. Looking forward, our team has developed a roadmap for the future of Iris.

Personal Reflection

I learned a lot of design methods through studying HCDM, many of which I had never heard of before, especially the method of concept generation and selection process such as Weighted Matrix and “4-3-5” Brainwriting.

In addition, the fully remote project is difficult, especially there are time differences among our team members and our client. Communication is extremely important. To ensure a smooth progression with our projects, We checked in with each other and set regular team working sessions every week, and conducted regular process checks with our clients. Effective communication lets the client know what we are working on and provides us with timely help when we need it, allowing the team to run more efficiently.

Also, I learned a lot about how to go from vague to a specific design problem in this project. Our initial theme was super broad, and how to narrow it down to find the exact pain points of users and provide solutions to their problems was a big lesson I learned from this project. Learning from user insights definitely helped a lot in this process.