Innovation Lab: Frictionless Travel
Case Study
The Innovation Lab is a service our agency offers. Within a Lab, we aim to solve complex business challenges for our clients, through ideation, in order to provide optimal experiences. The process takes roughly 4–6 weeks to complete. We begin by researching and interviewing existing and potential customers (as well as internal employees) and end with a UX Strategy that illustrates a product/service experience through a Hollywood storyboard format. This approach enables clients to envision how to solve key friction points in their customer’s experience(s).
My contribution:
- Co-created the Lab package
- Directed teams on all Lab projects
- Participated in pitching package to clients
- UX Strategy role on Lab projects
- Guided experience storyboards
Challenges
Agency life is all RFPs & NDAs
If you have agency experience you know how painful responding to an RFP can be. Especially since it is presenting a solution to a problem that probably doesn’t exist. We spent a lot of time and money on these pitches only to lose a good percentage of them.
The other challenge was most of the work we had been doing was tied up in NDAs, so we could never share much of anything. And what we could share were projects that didn’t show the depth of thinking that we had to offer. They were the typical format: Client gives us the solution to the problem they think customers have (or want) and tell us to design and build it.
All of these scenarios described above completely ignored the most important things: solving the right problems for the right people. We also had met with clients who were struggling internally to test new ideas who didn’t know where they should focus their limited resources—within a technology landscape that was moving at light speed.
Solution
Our Lab is born
From these challenges, the Lab was born (co-created with Joe Johnston). We decided we needed to create some of our own case studies that demonstrated how adept we were at solving problems.
We didn’t want to just take on problems we thought would be fun or complete unconstrained fantasies. We would use human-centered design and the best parts of other startup methodologies to solve true points of friction.
And we wanted the solutions that were beyond the easy digital answer. They would be practical and take into context the balance of physical and digital interactions that we all experience throughout our lives.
How the Lab works
To help remember how the phases fit together, we started using a camping metaphor: The Forest, The Trail, and The Campfire.
- In The Forest we listen, applying lean research techniques to talk to people and hear their stories.
- The Trail is then following a specific path, choosing one or two archetypes/characters (based on people we talked to) to tell a story about a moment in their life where they have an experience with that product or service.
- The Campfire is where we build the story, illustrate it, and share it with the team.
Results
The end results were captivating. We found that the discussions focused less around how to solve points of friction with only a set of screens. Even within the research phase, our team was looking at things like the physical environment of a space and other parts of an individual’s daily life that could be adding to the friction in their experience.
If our assignment began with “design an app that does X…” we would never (have the permission or time to) consider any of these other important parts of the problem.
The power of (human-centered) storytelling
In companies today, most proposals for new products or new features for existing ones are presented with stats, bullet points, tech specs, unrealistic screen designs, or even a press release of that future project.
With a vision, it is very important that everyone has the same understanding of that experience — especially in a large corporation. However, this typical proposal method places the burden on the listener(s) to assemble the vision from this assortment of disparate elements.
“A recent Human Tech podcast presented a research study that measured brain activity during storytelling. The research showed that during the climax of a story the listener’s brain activity is closely similar to the storyteller’s brain activity — creating almost like a real connection between the two.”
— Demian Borba
By telling (and I mean that somewhat loosely) a story you do several things:
- You are not designing screens or “lazy rectangles.”
- The focus of the solution circles around human beings, rather than interfaces or apps.
- When you present the solution it’s not limiting the output to bullet points and screenshots of things under glass.
- More importantly, the listener (as seen in research) almost directly connects and has a higher understanding of your idea.
Frictionless Travel: Hands-Free Baggage
In order to really understand the work I did within the Lab, here is one of the problems (a giant one) that we worked on for airports & airlines.
Where we started
Anyone who has boarded a plane understands the travel experience is less than optimal and full of friction. We applied our Lab approach to uncover the pain points, examine how these problems are currently being solved, and then explore ways to address them.
Guerrilla research in The Forest
The goal in The Forest sprint is to understand the users and their goals. The key is uncovering how people currently solve any problems and find the root(s) of friction. We utilized lean research methods, producing the artifacts (archetypes, journey map, business model canvas, etc) to guide us into the next sprint.
We reached out to a variety of travelers, flight attendants, and a dispatcher. Through this process, we uncovered some expected and unexpected results. This process (The Forest sprint) allowed us to begin shaping our empathy for the end users which we later channeled in our strategic and design efforts throughout the other sprints.
“The hardest part of my job is getting people [and their baggage] on and off planes.” — Natalie, Flight Attendant
A few friction points surfaced that touched on many aspects of air travel began to surface. Based on those findings we narrowed it down to luggage as a target and opportunity. To narrow the scope further, we focused on the luggage experience of leisure travelers since we found they spent 2.28 times more money than business travelers.
Our objectives were set for the next sprint:
- Improve the baggage experience, wayfinding, and time savings/expectations.
- Implement hands-free interactions and interfaces that reduce friction.
- Be predictive, making contextual connections between customers and services.
Exploring the landscape on The Trail
With an understanding of the landscape, users, and points of friction, the team was able to now begin the next The Trail sprint. We iterated through various ideas around the luggage experience and ran several ideation sessions looking at potential workflows for both the digital and service aspects of this experience.
We found there were companies —established and startups—looking at both products and services to address the problems that travelers experience with luggage. Most (at that time) were focused on attaching hardware to suitcases and ignoring the end-to-end customer experience.
“Luggage is long overdue for some serious innovation. The last big breakthrough — wheeled suitcases — rolled out in 1970. Crowdfunded startups and established luggage companies seem to have suddenly realized the market opportunity, and they are adding Wi-Fi hotspots, Bluetooth, SIM cards, GPS and built-in batteries to their products.” — CIO Magazine
We came up with a service we coined Hand’s Free Baggage, which utilized a 3-D printed sensor tag to pair with the user’s device. There were both a premium and standard version of the service which both offered visibility into location and status of baggage at any time.
Easy access drop off portals were available, or for the premium model, the baggage would be picked up at home.
The baggage would then be delivered to the final destination with the premium version, or for the standard, at the airport with clear directions to the carousel and notification when the luggage was close to being on the carousel.
This seamless customer experience would mean a much better travel experience for the leisure archetype, as well as additional revenue for airlines and airports. It could also give airports that adopted this (and equidistant to other airports) a more competitive business model.
“Industry Context: Baggage fees brought in $3.5 billion at about $25 per bag in 2014.” — US Department of Transportation
Telling stories around The Campfire
At this point, we were ready to validate the concept of the baggage as a product idea and tell the complete story around it for The Campfire sprint. We followed up with users that we originally spoke with to get their feedback on what we had created in the previous sprints. We finalized some of the workflows and explored the service package and base strategic opportunity.
We created high-fidelity stories that walked through the entire workflow. This would allow us to present the synthesized findings and product direction in focusing on the people that would be using the baggage service.
The most important aspect of the Lab for us is to not iterate simply on a product or business idea, but to tell a great story — one that can be holistically presented to customers or stakeholders to show strengths and /or risks of a new product.
We were able to start with a very wide scope — air travel — and quickly circle in to uncover the main points of friction and determine a specific path. We then had an idea we could go and validate with an airport and airlines.
Outcome
The beauty of beginning this process with lean research is that we would focus first on how people are currently solving problems in their lives. Clients loved the output of our Lab. The stories would drive the conversations to new places. That said, it wasn’t always roses at the end.
In some cases, clients were hoping that the solution would match an initiative that they had already sunk a lot of money into or a solution at the top of the hype cycle. In those cases, it came down to the politics of that particular organization and their perceived limitations or fears of upper-management.
When we are forced to think about the problem and then which tool we should use to solve that, it makes a complete difference in the solution we end up choosing. Doing this, we can lower our chances of missing the blind spots behind which great solutions live.
I strongly believe that we will see aspects of storytelling being tied into how we design and present experiences in the future.
Francisco Inchauste. User Experience, Strategy, and Interface Design.
You can read more of my writing here on Medium.
