Design a roadmap and a digital product for the future boarding process

Design a roadmap and a digital product for the future boarding process

Wang, Qiong (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Beets, Margreet (mentor)
Kuipers, Henk (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Design for Interaction

2019-12-20

This project is about digitalising the boarding process in the future context for KLM. This project has four phases: Research by explore the context and understand the stakeholders, Define the future vision and roadmap, Design a digital interface for the first horizon in the roadmap and lastly evaluation of the digital prototype. In the research phase, multiple research methods were conducted. The research phase has two parts, understanding the process and understanding the user. To get a thorough understanding of the process, internal documents reading, observation and expert interviews were conducted. After these research activities, the first list of problems was made, based on my personal perceiving. Afterwards, to understand how the stakeholders think about current process and tools, and also what is their desired future, more research was done with the three stakeholders: gate agents, managers and passengers. According to the results, the list of problems was revised adding the problems agents perceived. Besides the list of problems, a main problem was redefined for later design phase. In the second phase, a vision in five years were come up with, with three horizons step by step. The vision was designed considering all the different visions from different stakeholders and aiming at solving the main problem from research phase. Based on the vision and trends analysis, a cocreation session was conducted with four students, to generate ideas in this scope. Later, the ideas were mapped and divided into three horizons according to the importance and feasibility. The third phase started from looking deep into the first horizon in the roadmap. A design brief and a list of requirements were designed, under the context of the first horizon. Ideas were generated and finally two concepts were designed. After validating the two concepts with experts (two gate agents and a shiftleader), one concept was chosen for iteration. And iteration was made based on experts’ feedback. Later on, a high-fidelity interactive prototype was made to describe the functions and to prepare the final user test. The last phase is user test and evaluation. Five gate agents as well as two service agents were recruited randomly to the test. Due to technical limitation, participants were asked to pretend to work using the prototype and give feedback about the design. Based on the interviews and questionnaires, the data analysis was conducted. The result shows that agents rate a high score for the user experience of the new prototype. The prototype is regarded as supportive, proactive and in control in general. Based on the feedback from the user test, improvements were made to finalize the design. Moreover, the conclusions were drawn for the whole project and recommendations were provided for the company.

Design for future
boarding experience

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:89404b46-5a11-4961-a6ec-6c7afa685d65

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Qiong Wang