Re-think: Boarding Pass
As human beings, we perform a lot of day to day to activites and certainly most of them are not well designed. When we first perform something new, we tend to observe the nature of the action and the inconviniences that might be caused in the process. But after repeated action, we start ignoring the subtleties of it. We become numb to these emotions. This is our brain’s way of freeing up mental space so that we can focus on more important things at hand and less on the mundane things. This is a process called habituation. But for a designer, it’s crucial to focus on these things. Find out flaws and figure out ways to make the action more streamlined and intuitive.
While travelling via flights it’s esseantial to have a boarding pass. Normally, you’d ignore the design of it because most of us are so used to it (read: habituated). But after a bit of scrutiny, you’ll notice that they’re a terrible piece of design. Strangely I collected a lot of the boarding passes from my trips over the past few weeks and I began to notice the flaw in the design. To start off, the information was not presented in a clear manner and there was no grouping of related items. This causes a lot of hunting for the information. Often, travellers are tired, stressed, jet-lagged or maybe even first time flyers. The boarding passes should convey the information in a clean and easy to understand fashion.
Let me highlight some of the apparent design flaws in the boarding passes. The desk clerk has to always highlight the key information using a pen at the time of check-in (highlighted in green) to inform the customers where the information is. Instead of doing this, the airlines should make an effort on their part to make sure that this is clearly stated in the first place. In some of the cases the words are almost illegible (highlighted in pink). These are some things that almost everyone can notice. I’m not even discussing the technical aspescts. These passes are a good examples of bad design.
While coming up with a new design, I had to tackle a few constraints that might limit the pass layout (keeping in mind the Indian airports)
- Print constraints. The airports use a thermal printer that limits the colour of the printed text to only black.
- Limit the size of text in order to reduce cost and allow for longer names (city or passengers).
- Have enough whitespace in the centre for the security stamp (most common place). These always ends up covering some information on the pass. (See the Vistara pass for example. You have to really strain yourself to find the seat and boarding time)
- Consider the different people who might need to refer to the boarding pass apart from the traveller
- Inlcude essentials like barcode and safety messages.
- Limit myself to lighter tones in order to make it easy to read text.
I had to choose an airline for my design mockup. I decided to go with Vistara as it had easily the worst designed boarding pass and also partly becasue it’s my favourite airline in the country (love the food they give ❤). I adopted the company’s colour palette to maintain the brand identity and make it easier for people to recognise it. I tried to use the colours smartly to maintain a good amount of contrast between the various elements
I separated the information in three clear distinct areas. I read an amazing piece about the same by Adam Glynn-Finnegan, a designer with Airbnb. I went with a slightly differnt approach with the layout though.
1 This contains all the information regarding to the flight. The traveller has to refer to this most frequently. There’s a contrast between this area and the rest of the pass to highlight the same
2 Details regarding the passenger are given here. The passenger doesn’t have to refer to this frequently and is given a lesser priority.
3 This is the general information regarding the travel and boarding. This area is separated from the #2 with a good amount of whitespace for the security stamp.
With millions of people travelling everyday and using this essential item, it is important that they are well designed. I feel that the whole aiport experience has not changed a lot in the past decade. Sure there have been small improvements such as web check-ins and or have the tickets on your phones. But fundamentally it’s still very much the same thing. You still have to spend a good 60 minutes of your time atleast before you actually fly. I would really like to see some major changes to the whole process in the future. Till then all we can do is to try and make the current one a bit more convinient.
