Designing seamless UX for airline passengers

*This blog post first appeared on the Massive Interactive blog. Massive was acquired by Deltatre in November 2018.

The expectations of passengers are rapidly changing, driven not only by rapid advancements in technology, but also exposure to services such as Airbnb, UBER, Netflix and Spotify. These services have all gone some way to standardising people’s expectations of digital services and environments.

The ‘new normal’ for digital experiences extends to air travel experiences, where passengers are judging the quality of an Airline's digital experience based on their experience with non-airline services.

For the Airline industry, this sets a clear benchmark of what people expect – a service that is simple, intuitive, personalised and places more control in their hands.

Challenges for airlines

The reality and challenge for Airlines is that they operate in an incredibly complex set of physical environments. Providing passengers with a simple and unified experience as they transition from environment to environment, often with different technology and varying connectivity options, is currently extremely challenging.

The on-board environment particularly so, where passengers are often faced with an array of embedded technology which can vary greatly in capability and experience. While passengers are increasingly relying on their own devices (BYOD) for entertainment, they still need to easily and quickly make sense of what’s on offer for a particular flight, their available options, and understand how their BYOD could potentially complement the on-board offering. Providing a ‘seamless’ experience for customers as they move between these environments and technologies, is thus more challenging for airlines than other sectors.

New ways of working

In recent years, we’ve transitioned from a UX strategy and design agency that worked primarily on large new product experience design projects (where you often have the luxury to start with a clean slate) to now engaging with our clients in a more consultative manner. We work across a variety of their products and services with a mandate of continuous improvement and product evolution.

This enables us to work in an ongoing and collaborative manner with our clients and their internal teams, that allows organisations to better keep pace with changing consumer expectations. We identify and solve specific problems across a wide or narrow focus and similarly, over large and small engagements.

My team is equally adept at bringing new concepts and products to life as we are working with existing in-market products and services to improve the value and experience for the user. We bring concepts and products to life by identifying needs, intent and value, which in turn guide how we then design systems and experiences that deliver to those needs, as well as encourage stress free task completion, efficiently facilitate user journeys and provide holistic brand experiences.

Our Design Components shape the approach we take to identify and solve problems.

Our process provides a framework to enable informed decision making, based on expressing, testing and iterating concepts, improvements or new features before committing them to production.

The path to continuous improvement

It’s never too late for Airlines to start tackling some of the challenges passengers face to achieve a ‘seamless’ experience - one that provides unified, simple and stress-free interactions - that support the individual passenger’s journey across environment to environment, device to device, and places more control in their hands. Nor is it essential to wait until that next big project to start looking at ways to apply this thinking. By combining a considered UX strategy and collaboration with internal experts, we can begin to improve the unity of the experience, smooth out bumps and bridge some of the gaps that may exist in passenger’s overall experiences toward a truly seamless experience.

We’ll be at APEX in Long Beach this September 25th - 28th, chatting about and showcasing our user experience design strategies that both personalise and empower your customers, and enable a Seamless UX Experiences for airline passengers.

Please feel free to stop by for a chat at Stand 418.