The Airline Boarding Pass Redesigned
Every second planes are taking off worldwide. We pay a lot of attention to costs, destinations, boarding, and many many other things, but there’s one thing we don’t care about, and it applies to your boarding pass. Specifically, the kind of usability it should have?
Airlines have 90 years of boarding pass design under their belts but they’ve still managed to flub it.
Evolution
So What’s Wrong With Them?
Ungroup fields: time of departure and gate closing time are in two opposite corners
Tiny font are always a cumbersome activity to old people or people who are visually challenged checking it with bad lighting, not to mention while they’re on the go
Wrong visual priorities: the most prominent elements are the airport codes. If you know anything about your flight without needing to look at your boarding pass, it’s your origin and destination. You’d probably like to know everything else gate, seat, etc.
Current boarding passes have hideous usability. There is no grouping of data in them, as well as a lack of visual dominants, grids, space, and good typography. Their readability is poor, like crumpled punch cards.
Quantitative usability research: how long it takes (in seconds) to find necessary information on the ticket
Percentage of mistakes: the ratio of latecomers to boarded passengers
Downtime caused by long pick-ups
Cleaning up
Moved everything unnecessary for the passenger to the header and footer
Benefits
With a redesign like this we could expect:
Fewer passengers missing their flights
Fewer flight delays due to missing passengers
Fewer delays for removing baggage of missing passengers
Less load on airport information desks
Faster boarding: people know where to look for their seat and gate numbers
Conclusion
It’s clear that airlines see the value giving passengers tools to make their lives easier–just think of the shiny mobile apps airlines have put out in recent years. Glynn-Finnegan (https://www.adamgf.com) isn’t sure why the same thinking doesn’t carry over to the paper products. “Better layout of information leads to less stressed out passengers,” he says. He mostly thinks it’s a problem of inheritance. “Rather than redesign the boarding pass to be optimised for new technologies, airlines just bolt things on to the existing, broken passes. This means the boarding pass has not changed in years.”
And while it’s becoming easier and easier to check-in with a QR code on your phone, Glynn-Finnegan thinks there’s at least one big reason to get the physical pass right. “The paper pass will always outlive your phone battery.”