Sprint 4: We’ve Reached Our Cruising Altitude

**A note to our readers: the research activities described below occurred shortly before social distancing practices were recommended in response to COVID-19 in March. Our approach going forward has consisted entirely of remote research and testing. We hope that all of you are safe and well.**

Our capstone team is cruising along!

During our earlier sprints, we focused on understanding how users experience waiting, both in general and in airports specifically, and now we’ve used that research to start brainstorming HCI interventions to support our client, the Pittsburgh International Airport, with their Terminal Modernization Program.

After performing semi-structured interviews with users from different segments of the airport market, including family, business, leisure, flight crew, and student travelers among others, we synthesized our research and ideated as a team to help conduct further research through design.

Thus far, transparency, convenience, novelty, and customization have all surfaced as important user needs in airports across the globe.

We wanted to validate these needs through contextual inquiry and remote prototype testing. In order to do so, we took a three-pronged approach: contextual inquiry, conceptual prototyping, and diary study creation.

We sent Denny and Ketaki to explore the La Guardia, NY, Charlotte, NC and Orlando, FL airports in context and to research how Disney — “the king of lines” according to one interviewee — approaches the waiting experience.

We performed an ideation activity as a group known as “Crazy 8s” where we gave ourselves 8 minutes to sketch ideas that we could use as conceptual prototypes to test our research insights.

Through this design thinking workshop, we decided to create digital travel itineraries and airport journey diary studies for our classmates to test as they left Pittsburgh for Spring Break.

Each itinerary was customized for the traveler’s flight, mode of airport commute, and preferred “cushion” time before departure. We interviewed participants before and after their flights for feedback.

Our diary studies asked travelers to share their thoughts and feelings along every step of their journey, from packing at home to arriving at their final destination.

These tests, along with our contextual inquiries in NY, NC, and FL, were valuable to our research and validated that our design solutions need to be customizable for individual users’ travel and wait time needs.

We’re excited to incorporate our findings into future iterations and solutions. Stay tuned!