Alaska Airlines:

Improving the Flight Transferring Experience

How might we enable young adult travelers to better utilize their time during a layover?

HCDE Masters Capstone 2018-2019

Sami West, Amy Chen, Yahui Ma, Mandy Xu

Project summARY

For my master’s capstone project, I teamed up with 3 other HCDE students in order to solve a problem posed by Alaska Airlines.

From our extensive user research, we found that the combination of better time and option awareness at various stages of a trip will better equip travelers to utilize the time they have during a given layover.

Utilizing existing Alaska Airlines mobile app and website, we created designs to raise time and option awareness.

For a full overview of this project, feel free to download our Process Book!

User research roadmap

In order to gain a better understanding of our users, their pain points,  and our problem space, we engaged in a variety of user research methods.

For the first phase of research we focused on familiarizing ourselves with the problem space of flight transferring. We began by conducting a literature review to understand theoretical foundations, followed those insights with a competitive analysis of existing solutions, and ended by data mining yelp reviews of the SeaTac Airport to understand what people were saying about flight transfers. 

For the second phase of research, we were interested in understanding the overall experience of how users experience flight transfers. Our survey and interview data began by leading us to key findings that inspired our diary study questions. Our diary study then led us to uncover areas of opportunities and corresponding pain points within the user journey of transferring from one flight to the next, and together they allowed us to begin rationalizing how we plan to narrow our scope moving forward.

familiarizing with the problem space

We began by conducting a literature review to understand the key aspects of airport experience satisfaction, to understand psychological methods to improve the waiting experience, as well as the theoretical foundations for information that is needed for way-finding.

Following our literature review, we moved on to data mining.

After scraping 2,520 Yelp reviews of Sea-Tac Airport (324 relevant to flight transfers), we coded them into: satisfying experiences, frustrating experiences, information needed, and information people find hard to get.

Using these topics, we designed survey questions to further understand users’ opinions - we initially wanted to also look at opinions in Yelp review, but we found them to be (most time negatively) extreme. So we turned to survey for opinions.

understanding the overall experience

Statistical analysis and data visualization helped us gain insights from the survey data.

For example, the most satisfied ratings came from experienced travelers, with 5 or more flights in the past year, which indicates that through providing appropriate information, we can make users more “familiar“ with transferring, which leads to a more satisfied experience.

diary study

At this point in the project, we had a good idea of our users’ opinions, but we realized that we still needed to understand their behaviors.

We faced a challenge that we could not get clearance in time to conduct observation in the airport. We then made the decision to turn to a diary study to gather a better understanding of how a variety of travelers experience flight transfers.

We completed our diary study with 9 participants, all having flight transfers during the month of December 2018. Participants were asked to share their pain points, delights, and touch points along their journey from Flight #1 to Flight #2.

Our diary study revealed 10 major common activities that travelers engaged in during the transfer, in different orders. In follow-up interviews, we invited participants to add activities that were not covered, and to tell us more about their feelings and thoughts while they were engaging with each activity.

Participants of our follow up interviews were asked to participate in a card sorting activity in order to map out the order of common activities that they participated in during their flight transferring experience. When there were activities that they engaged in but weren’t listed, we created new cards to add them in. As well as identifying activities, participants were also able to indicate in which places they experienced pain points.

user journey maps

Our diary study, follow up interviews, and card sorting activities led us to the point where we were able to identify user journeys for 3 varieties of travelers:

1. Joe the Average Traveler, who is only concerned with getting quickly from one gate to the next in order to catch his flight

2. Justin the Explorer, who is interested in venturing outside of the airport during his long layover

3. Sara the Luxury Traveler, who has access to more amenities than others, including Airline Lounges and in-flight/airport wifi

design requirements & the ideal user journey

In order to translate our research findings into what was needed for our design solution, we created a list of design requirements for each stage of the trip. Each trip is divided down into the booking phase, time before the trip, time before the first flight, time during the first flight, the transferring period, and the second flight.

In order to make these actionable, we divided our design requirements up into two parts: functionality and customizability.

For the functionality of the solution, we went back to our 3 user journey’s and identified where we had marked both goals and pain points. We took the functionality requirements and placed them within an ideal user journey. From there we could vizualize the minimum pieces of information that users will need at each stage of the travel journey.

The chart on the right displays the design requirements for the functionality of the solution. Functionality was divided into four categories: trip stage, notification requirements, layover information, and flight specific information.

For the customizability of the solution, we went back to our competitive analysis and our diary study data. This allowed us to see which features were standardly customizable, what Alaska already customizes within their services, and what our users noted as wanting to be more customizable within their experience. We then organized these requirements into a table that we were able to go back to throughout our design process.

After sharing and building upon each other’s sketches, we created low-fidelity interfaces using Sketch to visualize concepts as a group. To support the booking phase, time before the trip, and the time during a user’s layover, we made enhancements to the existing Alaska website and mobile app.

We then critiqued and revised the initial prototypes and took ourselves through a cognitive walkthrough as a group to ensure that our flows and details were ready for concept/user testing.

evaluation

In order to evaluate the concepts of our prototypes, we designed and ran a concept user study centered around planning out and traveling for an upcoming trip. We set tasks for four different scenarios, covering booking, planning, the layover time, and the event of a delay. Each scenario and their corresponding tasks are outlined below:

Visibility of new features

1. Filter flights based on layover length

2. Compare flights with detailed information

Key Findings:

• Participants were not able to notice new features, but they were able to complete tasks with these new features

Design Recommendations:

• Improve the visibility of both the layover length filter and flight comparison features

• Improve the credibility of city information within the transfer city widgets: consider using Expedia or Google search results with information sources listed

time and option awareness

3. Layover time progress bar

4. Near gate activities information

Key Findings:

• Participants appreciated the time progress bar

• Participants want to find food close to their gate

• Participants are curious about how the restaurants are sorted as a default

Design Recommendations:

• Combine check-in success page with the detailed trip information page

• Sort restaurants based on distance as the default, and indicate this by highlighting that filter as active

• Use a city map to show where the airport is and where places of interest are in relation (e.g. downtown). Use the airport to “ground” the map for users

Presentation

video