OVERVIEW
A service design project to define and design an overall travel experience and essential customer touch points for Consolidated Air (a hypothetical company) to help them navigate their competitive advantage by utilizing new technologies. The proposed airline service was designed for families of 1 (or more) adults with younger dependents aged 0-8 years.
MY ROLE
I was responsible for ideation, storyboarding for the animation video and 3D modeling and video rendering of the family pod. I also contributed to the overall research, synthesis, ideation, and creative+strategic thinking.
KEY SKILLS
Service Design, UX Design, Visual Design
PROJECT DURATION
5 Weeks
TOOLS
Sketch, Sketchup 3D, SolidWorks, Keyshot Render, Illustrator, Keynote, IMovie, Adobe Animate CC
ADVISORS
Kristian Simsarian
Haakon Faste
TEAMMATES
Ajay Jayakumar
Chaitrali Bhide
Evan Babb
Manasi Saraswate
Zhao Wang
Final Product Video
PROBLEM
Air travel management and planning for families is uncomfortable, painful and time-consuming.
RESEARCH
Research Objective:
To understand the current needs of families with children aged 0-8 years and how they navigate themselves through planning, check-in, boarding, in-flight and post-flight experience.
Competitive Analysis
Many airlines have family-centric airline offerings which mostly cater pre-flight and during flight experiences to keep the children engaged and help parents manage the journey better.
25 Interviews & Surveys
This revealed that families have specific needs around Space, Time, Food, Child engagement, Queues, In-flight experiences, Prices, and Staff.
Roleplaying
Roleplaying the current experience of the families from planning to reaching the destination helped us understand the pain points.
Affinity clustering and synthesizing the data
INSIGHTS
Through the interviews, surveys, secondary research and role-playing, we derived at three key insights and opportunity areas in three main themes.
1.
Space
Children need space to move around. When seated together, families want to be able to rest comfortably without feeling crowded.
2.
Navigation
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.
Childcare
Parents are always concerned about their children’s safety. This prevents them from taking care of their personal needs while traveling. They would like someone responsible for taking over their childcare duties at intervals.
How might we reduce stress for families traveling by air and enable them to move around, play and rest comfortably by rethinking about the pre, during and post-flight experience?
IDEATION
Comfort | Convenience | Fun
Taking what we found from our previous research, we sketched around 50 different ideas for our themes. We clustered our ideas with Affinity Diagrams and started to form our potential directions by testing the sketch prototypes.
DESIGN OUTCOME
1.
SkyCap is an autonomous trolley that acts as a luggage porter, child tracker and navigational assistant.
2.
FamiliAir mobile app centered to families, to help them book flights, select seats and help them prepare for their journey.
3.
Family Pods are living room configured seats to enable families to sit comfortably together.
4.
Child Security Stickers are fun and simple RFID tags to help parents keep track of their children at airports.
1. SKYcap
The autonomous trolley is designed to help families navigate at the airport. It keeps track of the boarding time and allows parents stay close to their children, in addition to transporting the family's carry-on luggage. It is made with TSA compliant materials and integrated with RFID tags, machine learning, and spatial awareness.
2. FamiliAir Mobile App
The app helps in the pre-flight experience of parents traveling with children. The minimalistic design makes booking a flight a seamless experience for busy parents.
3. Family Pod
FamiliAir's aircraft interiors are designed with families in mind. The facing seats in family pods, access to onboard essentials, and open floor space invite families to travel together.
4. Child Security Stickers
RFID stickers working in conjunction with the SKYcap, so parents can know where their kids are as they explore the airport.
USER JOURNEY
With our vision of creating a comfortable, convenient and fun experience for FamiliAir, we created a feature list and identified various touch points. We developed a user journey map that maps out the specific touchpoints and helps the family at every single step.
To place the experience design strategically, we created a Business Model Canvas.
User Journey with key touchpoints
BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
Proposed Business Model Canvas for FamiliAir
REFLECTION
1. Going Broad, Potential design directions:
During the process, I realized the importance of being able to see the big picture. With our vision of creating a comfortable, convenient and a fun experience for FamiliAir, we were able to make informed decisions. It was challenging to see all the opportunities and map them on an experience considering financial and technological feasibility.
2. Now, next and future proposals:
Having understood the system and the business model, we then categorized our ideas into immediate and future implementations. This helped us as a team answer some of the strategical questions.