Re-designing the Flight Delay Experience (MS&E: Prototyping Organizational Change)

Skills applied:
Understanding & Observing, Synthesizing, Point-of-View, Ideating, Experiential Prototyping, User testing
Our client for this project was JetBlue Airways and our task was to re-design the flight delay experience so that customers will have a better experience at the airport during flight delays. We interviewed passengers at airports to understand their experiences, pains and complaints. The insight we came up with was that passengers do not like to be tied down to the gate as they are waiting for a flight and that they would like to roam around the concourse, visit gift shops, use the restroom, etc. To solve this problem, we prototyped the idea of using restaurant pagers at airports so that passengers would receive a pager upon arrival at the gate, and it would buzz when it is boarding time. These buzzers would also have advertisements for restaurants and retail shops in the concourse of the airport so that JetBlue could potentially generate revenue from advertisements as well. We tested this prototype at the JetBlue terminal at SFO and the results were that passengers loved the idea and wished it actually existed. We presented our idea to JetBlue and they seemed to be very receptive of the idea as well and thought it would a good way to generate some extra revenue with the retail store advertisements.