The Airport Journey Begins at Home
You think by now we should at least know how to spell queue. Unfortunately, it is still a struggle but that doesn’t mean we don’t have lots of insight on queuing behavior to share! Now that we have a solid understanding of the psychology behind waiting and queuing theories through our secondary research, it’s time we observe actual passengers in context.
Our team made two visits to the Pittsburgh Airport and experienced the journey from parking all the way to the gate. As we observed and occasionally made awkward eye contacts with people in line from Dunkin’ Donuts, we saw people aimlessly scrolling through their phones, kids tucking their moms’ jackets, and people anxiously looking at the TSA agent.
We found that at around 7 am, the line for TSA pre-check is actually longer than the regular line because more business travelers are flying early in the morning. The alternative security line, while always a shorter wait than the regular line, is underutilized and not noticed by people.
But is that all? Why do people arrive at a certain time? How do they plan their travels? How do they feel when they see a long line?
Reframing the airport experience: where does it all begin?
Simply observing passengers at the TSA queue won’t actually capture their whole experience. We needed to step in the shoes of travelers and understand the mental work that goes into planning a trip. That’s when we decided that we need to reframe the whole airport waiting experience — the airport journey begins at home.
At 5 am on an early Friday morning, we followed members from our cohort who are traveling to New York from their homes all the way to their gate. This process was done with a method we use a lot in MHCI called contextual inquiry (otherwise known as shadowing), where we follow our interviewees while they think-aloud along the way. This helped us understand their mental models and what they were thinking throughout the journey.
Finding patterns
With all of our observations from the analogous worlds research, pretotype, and observation at the airport, we created an affinity diagram with over 200 notes.
Key takeaways are that:
- People are anxious when they have no control. For example, person in front of them being slow, sitting in an Uber, or forgetting to bring something
- People accommodate/compromise when they’re traveling with others, such as when finding an agreed time to meet at the airport
- Some people plan on the fly while others plan ahead and this affects their emotions throughout the journey
Our next phase of research involves conducting semi-structured interviews with different passenger segments: business travelers, travelers with kids, seniors, flight attendants..etc.
Some of the questions we want to be able to answer next round:
- What are users’ pain points?
- How do different passenger segmentations affect their travel experience?
- What are people’s mental models of airports/planning?
Stay tuned. The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting ;)
