Break Through Airport Confusion! (Lost at the Airport, Part 2)
Part 1: Why Do We Travel?
If you enjoy travel as much as I do, you’re living in the perfect time period. According to a Business Insider article published at the end of 2019, there’s been a humongous shift over the past decade:
Contrary to the stereotypical belief that Americans don’t travel, we’ve been doing it more than ever in recent years, with no signs of letting up in the future. However, is the travel industry ready for our increasing appetite for adventure? What implications does this influx of new fliers mean for the existing processes of standard airports and existing airline companies?
The Problem with Airports
Let’s face it, the world gets smaller every year. Notwithstanding any major economic meltdown or political destabilization, the airport will become the bus stop of the future, as they increasingly frequented by more numerous and diverse groups of travelers.
However, have you ever gotten lost at the airport? Have you ever been berated by TSA, for unintentionally breaking a security guideline? What about not knowing how to find a car rental, or a hotel to stay at?
There are many aspects of airport user experience that are yet to be simplified for first time fliers.
The Problem with Airlines
It’s no secret that there are a lot of airline companies; despite its high barrier to entry, there is a lot of competition in this space. As travel becomes more common in the future, it only follows an enormous amount of pressure will fall on the travelers, in trying to figure out which airline to choose for their flights.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Consider restaurants as an example: while also highly competitive, services like Yelp have made it tremendously easier for customers to compare their different options. Yelp has proved customers trust other customers’ reviews, in order to help them make a decision. Furthermore, we know customer feedback increases buyer confidence in more than just the restaurant industry. Amazon proved this as well back in the late 1990s with books, another highly saturated market, despite initial resistance by incumbent book publishers.
Why is there not a “Yelp for Airlines”? How would reading reviews by other customers of the airline, help improve customer experience in choosing one?
Current Solutions
Talk to a seasoned traveller, and you may get the sense that learning how to navigate the airport is “common sense.” Somehow, it’s a skill that will be learned just like how you and I learn to ride a bike, play an instrument, or speak a foreign language: make a bunch of mistakes, and eventually it will become second nature. While this is certainly reasonable, learning by trial-and-error is certainly costly to the user, who’s got a lot of wasted time, money, and energy in store if they miss their flight, get lost in the airport, become tangled up in security, or any of the several mishaps that can happen at the airport.
In terms of solutions, there are not many today better than simply traveling with a buddy. As a child, this helped me out enormously — my parents were always there with me, side-by-side in the hustle and confusion of the airport. They could explain to me the process of having to find the right Gate at the airport, needing to check-in, clear up any misunderstandings that arose with security, and be with me as I boarded the plane. Similarly, airport officials are generally very helpful in my experience. However for those of us that travel alone, such as students and professionals traveling for their education and or career, is there any sort of online tool to help us navigate the airport?
The answer is a resounding yes! Today all airlines, at least those who are part of the International Airport Transport Association (IATA), and accounting for about 82% of the world’s air traffic according to iata.org, have their own website. Many of them have mobile apps as well.
For the customer, having access to these virtual resources on the go, and all to themself, is certainly better than being forced to rely on a human to tell you details such as:
your airport terminal,
your boarding time,
the reason why you’re going to tick off security for not taking yourlaptop out of the backpack,
and other details of the travel process.
However problems still arise here, as each airline has their own website, but most customers use multiple airlines. Think back to the last time you bought a plane ticket. Were you dead-set on flying with one airline, or did you shop around? Most of us fall into the second camp. Customers loyalty in the airline industry melts away faster than ice cream on a summer day, due to factors such as lack of competition in pricing: as one CNBC article notes, 68% of travel in the U.S. falls under just four airlines.
Of course, their are services today such as Travelocity and Kayak that help consumers compare airplane ticket prices across many airlines — but what about after the. flight’s booked? A novice traveller today is likely to accumulate membership with many different airlines over the course of their travels — why can’t there be a website or mobile app to help them guide them through the airport, across many airlines, after the flight is booked and their worries shift to actually making their trip?
Competitive Landscape
As of today, the landscape for “travel training” — solutions that help people prepare for their first trip through the airport alone — divides itself amongst two axes.
There are solutions that come from other users, such as a Yelp would be, and those that come from the company, such as an airport website or airline website.
On another axis, there are solutions that are personable, and those that are virtual.
- Virtual, user-generated: Travelly!
- Personal, user-generated: travel buddy
- Personal, airline-generated: airport and airline employees
- Virtual, airline-generated: airline websites, airport websites
As you can see, the travel industry has a gaping hole when it comes to travel training that is virtual, so that it can used by lone travelers, as well as user-generated, meaning it can aggregate information across many airports and airlines, all in one place.
Part 2: User Research
I will be the first to admit that as of now, there are several untested assumptions in my analysis of the travel industry thus far:
Some of the assumptions I have already made are:
1. Travelers respond well to step-by-step instructions online airline and airport tools
2. Customers tend to use many different airlines.
3. Novice travelers find it difficult to duplicate the process of travelling through the airport across different airports and different airlines
To test these assumptions, I decided to interview someone with much more experience with airlines, airports, and overall travel than myself: my Dad.
Two Mistakes in User Interviews I Made
- Interviewing someone for user feedback, who isn’t actually qualified as a user
- Talking about solutions instead of problems with the user
Unfortunately, I realize now my father wasn’t the best candidate to do a user interview with, because he’s not part of the audience Travelly is geared towards, which is novice travelers. Nonetheless, as a former officer in Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), my father has lots of opinions, and he doesn’t hold them back. In my misjudgement, I asked him to user test my site. He agreed, but then proceeded to ask me what features were already online.
Let this next part be a lesson to you, because I made this mistake and it made the interview a complete waste of time: don’t ever talk about solutions with the user in an interview. When I told my father that you could use the site to get directions for the airport, and read reviews for different airlines by other users, he lost it. Suddenly I was in a barrage of questions from my father, trying to interogate my design decisions, and investigate why there weren’t more features on the site:
- Why haven’t you enabled payments?
- How is the site supposed to make money?
- Why isn’t there an option to translate instructions?
- What if I want to find a car rental out of the airport?
- How about hotel reservations?
I tried to be polite and thanked my father at the end of the discussion, for being thoughtful enough to generate these ideas for my site. However, I say this was a complete waste of time; because at this point, how do I know if adding these features would actually improve the site? They were suggested by someone who’s not even in the target market. On top of that, my father walked away with a self-serving (albeit innocent) sense of being helpful. He never proceeded to user test my site, and so I didn’t even get feedback on the features that were already up.
What To Do in User Interviews Instead
In summary, although the above features would definitely be cool to implement, I’m going to table them for now, at least until a later version of Travelly. Right now as I scope an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for my market, which is novice travelers, I need to make sure I’m sticking to features only desired by the target audience, not feedback by well-meaning users.
Secondly, although my father’s ideas could just be a result of our relationship (that is, he was feeling he had to give engineering advice since I’m his son), I believe it’s my fault for not asking him more about travel problems. It should never be the user’s job in an interview to give feedback on what product solutions should look like. That’s not their job, so they lack context on what will really hit the market. The user’s job is to highlight the real problems the engineers need to solve, because that’s where they can speak from their true self. They have experiences related to their problems; but they don’t have skin in the game to talk about how the solution should look like. If I had to do this interview over again, I would focus more on asking questions such as these to my father:
- When you were young, did you get lost in airports a lot?
2. If you did, why do you think you got lost?
3. Do you tend to travel alone or with someone?
4. When you travel with someone, how does it change the experience from when you travel alone?
5. Have you ever been lost in an airport? If so, how did you find your way?
6. Have you ever been lost in an airport and had no idea how to find your way? How did you deal with that? What did it lead to?
7. Now when you travel, do you travel on previous experiences to find your way? Have your travel experiences changed as a result?
Part 3: Travelly Product Design
What is Travelly?
Travelly is an online travel tool that helps first-time fliers navigate the airport, and connects them with amazing airlines.
Travelly is online so that novice travelers can benefit from it, when they’re traveling alone. Like a “Yelp for Airlines“, it aggregates reviews of airlines from users, to provide the feedback trusted most by other users as they choose an airline for their trip.
To be clear, this product is not meant to compete with existing resources that airlines and airports provide to their travelers, such as maps and terminal names; rather it is a supplement. Like a “Netflix for First-Time-Traveler-Advice”, Travelly simply functions as a supplement to those resources; because this will provide a one-stop shop users can always come back to, no matter what the airport or airline related to their flight. As opposed to the user having to go to a different website for directions every time they switch airport or airline, Travelly is meant to provide ease, a sense of clarity, and support to the user travelling for the first time.
User Journeys
Users will interact with Travelly in a number of ways. Consider the following persona:
Hi, my name’s Isaac and I am 18 years old. I will be living away from my parents for the first time this fall, when I start college. My parents were really scared for me, because it’s an out-of-state school, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to fly on my own — that’s part of why I’m so glad I found Travelly.
Before Travelly, I had no idea what it even meant to “go through the airport.” It just seemed like a tremendously busy place, there’s so many people rushing around, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around where to go and what I’m supposed to do.
Travelly simplifies everything. On Travelly, all I have to do is go in, put in what airline I’m going with, where I’m leaving from, and where I’m going to, and it gives me step-by-step instructions on what to do. I can also read the instructions for trips posted by other users, which I think will be helpful in my future travels.
My parents and I are also big on saving. We want to get the most for our dollar plain and simple, and I don’t like having to spend hours agonizing over what airline to choose. Again, Travelly makes life a lot easier in this regard. I read Travelly reviews every time before I buy a plane ticket — they give a good gist of what I’ll have to pay, relatively speaking, between different airlines, as well as the service I’ll receive for it as well.
Product Design: Screenshots
Here a few shots to showcase the website pages from Isaac’s story.
The Rewards of Travel, Without the Confusion
So Why Should You Care About Travelly?
If you’re someone new to flying, then at this point you have two options to learn how:
- Do what everyone else does: learn to “grow up” the hard way. Deal with the time, money, and energy costs to learning how to go through the airport on your own experiences, learning through trial-and-error;
- Join the Travelly community, and learn (as well as teach!) through interacting with the trips posted by others, and the customer service experiences they had with choosing one airline versus another.
Travelly is my gift to the adventurous:
- those who travel before they know if they’re ready,
- those are brave enough to move away from home for school,
- those who persist through fatigue, missed flights, and all the nonsense that comes with travel
In short, Travelly is the tool I’ve created for people who go above and beyond to maximize their opportunities, even when they might not necessarily have everything figured out.
If you believe as I do that it is one’s mission, duty, and responsibility to reach their optimal performance in life, I ask you to be among the first to join the Travelly. Share your trips, review airlines, be among the earliest members of this social network and I promise you, it’ll provide support for you and the other adventurers out there!
