Project Overview

This project involved designing and proposing a holistic airline service experience for ‘Consolidated Air’ which caters specifically to families.

For this project, we chose to focus on families with 1 or more adults with younger dependents, aged 0-8 years.

My Role

I was responsible for the chalk-drawing Animations in the video, Sticker Design, Airline Lavatory Design. I created Familiar’s Business Model and, the Machine Learning-based system logic for the Skycap Agent. I also contributed to the project’s overall research, synthesis, ideation, storyboarding as well as creative and strategic thinking. Additionally, I helped my peers with form exploration for the Skycap Agent, Script Writing for the video, and refined details of the key touch-points.

Research

Competitive analysis of existing airline’s family-focused offerings, roleplaying an airline experience as a family, and conducting interviews with parents of children aged 0-8 years revealed that families:

• want to sit together comfortably and have enough space for everyone to rest and relax

• wish for their children to have more space to move around, be entertained appropriately and have someone to look after them at intervals

• try to book uncrowded non-stop flights that sync with the children’s sleep schedules

• wish to reduce wait times, have structured navigation and support for their childcare needs while moving within the airport

• prefer staff that are attentive and empathic towards their needs

• have several constraints to consider when packing certain childcare products

• are willing to pay extra to ensure children are comfortable

Insights

Through the interviews, surveys and some roleplaying, we derived three keys insights centered around three main themes.

1.
Children need space to move around. When seated together, families want to be able to rest comfortably without feeling crowded.
 

2.
Every step of the journey at the airport requires families to wait in line. They would benefit from structured/clear navigation and support for their children’s needs.
 

3.
Parents are always concerned about their children’s safety. This prevents them from taking care of their personal needs while traveling. They would like for someone responsible to take over their childcare duties at intervals.

Through this process, we defined three opportunity areas by asking ourselves the following three questions.

Key Touchpoints

We narrowed down our ideas with the help of dot voting to the following four key touchpoints:

1. Skycap
   an autonomous robotic trolley that acts as a luggage porter, child tracker and navigational assistant
   

2. Family Pods
   living room configured seats to enable families to sit comfortably together
   

3. Child Security Stickers
   fun and simple RFID tags to help parents keep track of their children at airports
   

4. Familiair App
   a mobile app catered to families, to help them book flights, select seats and help prepare for their journey

The project involved design research, ideation, and system thinking - further details can be found in the project documentation.

Learnings

During this exciting project, we redesigned an entire airline service for a specific target audience (families with children). It was challenging to design a service to fit into the larger air travel system experience and identify 3 core touch-points to develop simultaneously. I enhanced my understanding of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning through this project, and integrated it into the user journey in a meaningful way. It was an insightful learning experience, and our team did a thorough job in designing a holistic experience that catered to various aspects of this airline service.