Personalised recommendations are largely generated to provide passengers with relevant suggestions for their next trip, ie. destinations, accommodation and means of transport at the destination. However, personalised recommendations on choice of seat hasn’t been as popular.
What if flight experience was designed around people's needs and preferences? What if they can select seat options based on their preferences of desired comfort, price range, and body measurement? Could that experience offer a more personal travel experience to people?
How might we design a product for passengers that delivers not only more accessible and accurate personalised on-air experiences, but also protection for their provided private information?
Twinsie categorises passengers based on their prioritised values and personal preferences when travelling. Our research result suggested three major groups of target audience, namely those who favour comfort over price, convenience over price, and cost over comfort and convenience.
To bring our concept into fruition, we first needed to empathise and understand the current standing of flight booking systems and their users. We conversed frequent air passengers and learnt their booking and on-air challenges.
Following our primary research, we moved on to creating an empathy map that helped us get a general understanding of the paint points we wanted to help alleviate.
Using our initial research and analysis, we then created user personas to help us narrow in who we were designing for and its solutions.
We started ideating our product by following a set of question to guide us through the process. Some of these questions are:
- How can we simplify the overall experience and process of using the application?
- How can we create a peace of mind about privacy for users?
With these question in mind, we began sketching out how our product might look like and kept note of why it was designed that way.
Prior to proceed with visualising concept and ideas, we created a brief flow to organise paths that users will follow when using the app.
We started with Crazy 8’s method to sketch out ideas for “Search Flight” and “Flight comparing” screens. Crazy 8's helped us visualise our rough ideas onto paper under limited time frames: 1 min per sketch for 1 screen.
We chose flight searching and comparing screens since they reflected the main ambiance and purpose of the product.
We then moved on to paper prototype sketching; followed by conducting tests with clickable wire-frame for the final iteration.
Information regarding users' body measurements and travel prioritised value are acquired to provide the most relevant search results. These steps can be skipped and information can be added and/or modified later under Profile section.
Concerning the main objective of Twinsie, search results include Comfort Matching percentage besides other essential information in summary, namely departure and arrival destinations, flight time and duration, and price.
Twinsie highlights air passengers' comfort by displaying firstly seat selections with users' digital twin as flight search results. Users' digital twins are also presented seating in the chosen seat, to give better demonstration of expected on-flight experience and comfort.
Seats are categorised into class and in-row location. Further information regarding flight on the chosen seat is handed out within the expandable card underneath.
Because of our limited time and resources, we missed out on opportunities to make this project even better. So if we had the opportunity to push this even further, these are what I would do differently:
→ Dive deeper into the user's journey
→ Usability test with real users
→ UI transitions to give visual orientation
→ Accessibility considerations