Boarding Pass refresh

Research Plan

Our leadership asked for a new boarding pass that met design system and brand standards, but the design team and I knew we could take this opportunity to also improve the overall UX/UI of the boarding pass at the same time. One challenge of this redesign was the internal and external uses of a boarding pass. We needed to create a customer friendly design that also served the employee needs for access to specific information (irrelevant to the passenger). With this in mind, the lead designer and I worked closely to define what research we needed in order to accomplish the tactical requirements as well as figure out how to improve the overall user experience in a fairly short amount of time.

Discovery

We used the discovery phase to evaluate when and how customers used the boarding pass, opportunities to optimize the pass and what our competitors were doing. Much of this phase was conducted by the lead designer, with my input and oversight of specific research activities.

This phase included:

• Journey mapping to understand where in the day of travel customers accessed and referred to their boarding passes.

• Customer airport interviews to gather insights of what information they expected from a boarding pass, information prioritization, and qualitative feedback about the current boarding pass.

• Competitive analysis of other boarding pass informational architecture, use of color and overall layout.

Design explorations

From the discovery phase, we learned there was work to be done on the information hierarchy, organization, color usage and accessing multiple boarding passes. The design team then came up with multiple concepts that varied from a more conservative design to a few that stretched our mental model of a boarding pass. For this exploration, the lead designer also completed an additional competitive analysis, but not of boarding passes. Instead he looked at apps that presented a lot of information in different visual layouts to get inspiration.

The designers and myself conducted expert reviews and heuristic evaluations with these designs to create a hybrid design that both made the boarding pass functional but also innovated on how we access and update information.

Iterations

45 customers over 3 rounds of usability testing

Next we brought our design hypothesis to the most important people, the users! I conducted 45 usability sessions over 3 rounds of remote unmoderated usability tests of a mobile app boarding pass prototype (usertesting.com) to iteratively improve the design. We also spoke with airport staff and important stakeholders to ensure the boarding pass served operational needs. I chose this methodology because we needed the ability to test the boarding pass multiple times before finalizing a design in a short amount of time. Since the stimuli was essentially one page, the iterative testing allowed us to refine small details and test it again quickly. These three rounds took about two weeks with design iterations included. There were limitations to the study including the fact that users were not actually traveling, and therefore not contextually providing feedback. We ensured all participants had traveled in the last 6 months as well as went through the journey map exercise to help account for this. We also ensured to monitor customer feedback post launch, making small updated as needed.

Insight highlight: In the first round of testing, many participants felt the boarding pass and flight status details were disconnected. One person specifically called out there was no identifying information on the boarding pass to correlate it to the flight status information below.