Sprint 5: We are experiencing some turbulence! Please fasten your seatbelt.
As we reached our cruising altitude in the previous sprint, we identified transparency, control, and efficiency as important user needs. Our goal in Sprint 5 now was to narrow our scope by understanding Pittsburgh International Airport travelers’ specific experiences. However, this ride did not go as smoothly as we planned. We, like all of you, encountered major turbulence, COVID-19.
This pandemic has drastically changed our research plan and altered the way we work.
We lost in-person access to PIT users as our plan to interview travelers in the airport had to be placed on hold. We also halted our plans to conduct contextual inquiries at the Toronto and Chicago airports for competitive analysis.
Instead, we pivoted our approach to focus on remote opportunities to accommodate social distancing and shelter-in-place requirements.
We took this opportunity to spend time digitize our affinity diagram and synthesize our findings to identify the five major airport-related pain points:
- Other traveler’s behavior
- Unknowns in the airport
- Inconsistent security guidelines
- High cognitive load and stress
- Traveler’s anxiety
From there, we brainstormed How Might We (HMW) questions to further narrow our research, focusing on the most important and impactful challenges to tackle. We invited our client to co-create with us to learn which questions would be most valuable for us to answer from their point-of-view.
After identifying the overlaps, we narrowed down to these three focus points:
- How might we increase transparency, consistency, and predictability at the airport?
- How might we account for the impact of Covid-19 on human interaction in the airport?
- How might we provide travelers with a positive experience and reduce their anxiety in the queue?
Moving forward with this more narrowed focus, we generated 20+ storyboards for remote speed dating. During these sessions, we aimed to observe how users reacted towards the scenario in order to help us validate or disprove the need we identified. It was not meant to identify the medium in which the solution would be carried out.
We also made use of video conferencing tools to ensure that we accurately captured our users’ emotions and thoughts by not only listening to what they said but also observing their body language and expressions.
As we approach our next sprint, we will synthesize the findings gleaned from these speed date sessions and develop our plans to move forward in the summer!
Though during this sprint we experienced lots of ups and downs, we are very grateful for the encouragement we have received from our clients and faculty. We are pleased to say that we have safely flown through this turbulence and maneuvered strategically around the obstacles and setbacks we encountered. Hopefully, our research can help make airport travelers feel safe.
More exciting insights and destinations will be coming soon!
