Introduction
This is a semester-long project for our HCI foundations class, and we decide to focus on solo travelers at airport who, based on our survey to 50+ people, frequently felt bored, anxious, tired, or "trapped in the airport".
Our research has shown that the type of mood that travelers are in depends largely on the duration of the layover, their ease of movement through the airport, and the facilities and amenities present. Thus, we define our initial problem space as helping travelers with long layovers alleviate boredom at the airport.
However, after consulting with our TA and professor, we found that the airport environment seemed primed for creating new connections with people as there are already a group of diverse individuals at an airport in close proximity.
Thus, we rephrased our problem statement as:
How might we create a thriving community of flight travelers across the world?
User group
We have defined young solo travelers as our primary user group. The key characteristics of this group is that they are often traveling alone, usually on a budget, and particular open to knowledge or cultural exchanges.
Based on our 10+ interviews with the primary users, we developed the following persona:
Research
We had three main research goals:
Learn about people’s social experience at the airport (if any)
Learn about people’s current social interaction habits
Derive design implications for creating a social networking solution at an airport
We wanted to understand if and how social interactions would change in an airport context. There are additional factors to consider including: safety, personal belongings, time management, and a constrained space.
Method
We first used online surveys to gather 30+ valid responses from a relatively diverse group (age range 21-60， across 5 countries) and our key findings are presented below.
We conducted a focus group of 5 participants to discuss the social interactions at the airport, and found the following key insights:
1.
Proximity - conversations may happen at the gate, restaurant, or wherever the travelers are due to the density of people at an airport
2.
Others initiate - travelers, especially those who tend to be more introverted, prefer to engage in conversation only if others start it first
3.
Similar interests - there needs to be some common ground in order for a conversation to take off or be memorable
4.
Open to connect - most travelers won’t specifically seek out social interactions at an airport, but said they would be open to the idea of connecting with other travelers
5.
Knowledge sharing - conversation topics usually included travel experiences, and career interests
6.
Beyond the airport - conversations also commonly occurred on the plane itself when sitting next to each other, sometimes even exchanging contacts (however, never really followed up with each other)
7.
Safety - people usually are always concerned with safety, but we wanted to note in several of our interviews, they thought safety was not a particular issue because everyone had already passed through the security check
8.
Everything still depends - interest in social interactions heavily dependent on mood, energy levels, physical appearance, airport layout etc.
Ideate
We began our brainstorming process by having each of our team members do two rounds of ‘Crazy 8’s’, a rapid brainstorming technique where we had five minutes to come up with eight ideas with a five minute break between the rounds.
After the team idea generation, we captured the more “completed” ideas on sticky notes and grouped them together into various themes.
Grouping ideas with similar traits together and voted on them as a team
Selection Process
After the ideas were aggregated and grouped into themes, the team voted on as many specific ideas they would like in order to converge onto potential solutions. Since our ideas were based on our research, we did not have any strict criteria for voting such as feasibility or practicality.
As a result, we ended up converging on the top three themes based on the most voted on ideas: game, knowledge exchange, and physical space.
After voting on ideas, we converged onto three themes: game, knowledge exchange, physical space
With our mind map and three themes, each team member then explored ideas around these themes with a rough storyboard and low-fidelity sketches that would lead to the creation of our design alternatives.
Design alternatives
To get feedback on our design alternatives, we created a poster with storyboards to help viewers visualize the user flow during our poster session, and asked them to leave sticky notes about their most and least favorite ideas
Our design idea poster
Afterwards, we created medium-fidelity prototypes for each design ideas and talked to users individually to get more-detailed feedback.
Cultural Swap
Based on the feedback we received for language exchange hub, we created a pros-and-cons table.
Drifting Bottle
Based on the feedback we received for drifting bottle, we created a pros-and-cons table.
Airport Escape
Based on the feedback we received for airport escape, we created a pros-and-cons table.
Team Photo at poster feedback session :)
Prototype
1. Onboarding
Onboarding includes both intro and registration. We hope that the concise introduction can help users know what the app is and invoke their intention of exploring the app.
2. Creating the Airplane
The plane creation process is made up of the plane customization, story composition, and the paper folding before the plane takes flight.
2a. Start a plane
2b. Start writing
2c. Make your plane
3. Throw the Airplane
Once the user is ready to share their plane, a screen appears letting the user know that their plane is ready to be “thrown”. Instructions guide the user on the exact mechanics of throwing, which involve adjusting the angle of the paper plane and its speed through controls on the screen.
The following diagram lists the various actions that will be explored and evaluated for the "throwing an airplane" interaction.
4. Search and select airplanes
There are three ways you can search available airplanes around you, as represented in the top tab bar: map view, scan view, and list view.
5. Read and react to airplanes
6. Saved planes
Testing
Usability Specifications
We have a series of goals we hope to achieve:
1. Travelers are able to freely share their travel experiences or thoughts with other travelers across the world
2. Travelers are able to read other travelers’ stories and save them if they choose to do so
3. Travelers are motivated to continue to read and share stories anytime they are at airports
4. Travelers have the freedom to control and moderate the content they wish to see
To ensure we successfully these goals, we dveloped a list of usability principles to support our user testing planning.
Discoverability & Learnability
Robustness
Other Heuristics for Web-based Community
Evaluation Plan
Focus Group
The goal of focus group was to gather users' opinions on the prototype's features. Specifically, we formed a group of 5 participants and 2 facilitators to conduct the following activities:
Task 1: What do you want to read at an airport?
Goal: understand what kind of content would people be interested in reading or sharing under the airport context.
Task 2: Why would you write a story?
Goal: understand the motivation behind people creating stories and explore potential ways to incentivize users to write good stories.
Task 3: how would you throw an airplane?
Goal: decide whether to use physical interaction or screen as the default for throwing an airplane feature; get a clear idea for the physical interaction design.
Task 4: what feedback would you like to give and receive?
Goal: understand how people would like to react to airplanes they read.
Prepared material for focus group
Group discussion in progress
Usability Testing
We recruited five classmates who had recent air travel experiences to participate in our testing.
They were first asked some screener questions including their travel habits, their last layover experience and any social media apps or online communities they are a part of. Then they were asked to imagine themselves in a four hour layover and presented with the prototype.
Afterwards, they went through a series of task scenarios followed up with a series after each task. After the tasks they were also asked to complete a SUS questionnaire.
The tasks include:
Complete the onboarding process (focus on concept understanding)
View your profile (focus on privacy)
Write a paper plane story and share it to the community (focus on categories, tools, instructions, plane takeoff & comments)
Search and read a paper airplane (focus on search method & comment)
Save and view saved paper planes (focus on motivation & interaction)
Usability testing in progress
Team photo with a participant after testing
Testing Result Poster
Final Poster of Testing Results
Final Poster Presentation
