Example: Icelandair Flight - POS Application

I ran an observational research round trip from Dublin to Iceland with Icelandair to observe our vPOS application in use during the flights. This research is a qualitative method where I could observe, shadow and interact with the cabin crew during an active flight. Observing the cabin crew in context helped me understand the real-life implications of how vPOS fitted into their time sensitive and demanding workflow. I was able to see first-hand common issues, pain points and distractions they faced and found opportunities to fill some gaps that currently exist.

Goals

• To view the cabin crew’s true workflow

• Identify areas of struggle

• View environment factors and constraints

• Observe the emotional state of the cabin crew

• Shadow the crew, capturing quotes

Observational Research

The observational research was a huge success and generated large volumes of valuable data, this was then placed together with an observational trip with Jet 2 airline run by another colleague. The research was able to remove the reliance on the human memory and provide insights into what our users actually do rather than what they think they do. This uncovered our users true needs that the user themselves may not have been aware of. 

Key Findings

• The cabin crew felt very confident in using the software. A new set of cabin crew from Spain used it for the first time a few weeks ago and it went very smoothly.

• Their workflow was sometimes interrupted during the flight with a toast message, “Connection to server failed; SSL handshake failed”. This came up 4 times during one transaction and the cabin crew couldn't use the POS app until it faded.

• The pin pad devices were arriving cold and the cabin crew were warming them up with their hands before turning them on to improve battery life. This was especially important for long haul flights when there is only one charging point in the galley. The devices also sometimes arrived only half charged at the beginning of a flight.

• The numbers on some of the Pin Pad devices were faded and not backlight which was hard for passengers to read especially during nighttime flights. This caused a high number of passenger input errors which is an issue when time efficiency is of great importance.

• The crew also spoke about needing more feedback from the app for tasks completed (for example if the loyalty points went through on a passengers card or not)

All the findings were placed into an Affinity Map so it could be analysed and synthesised to find common patterns and themes.

Summary

The observations were prioritised through a team dot voting session. Each observation was turned into a defined pain point and given its own goal and metric in which it could be measured. We could now clearly see the areas that our users valued the most and where we could make the biggest difference in the product.

Next Steps

Persona and Empathy Mapping Workshops

This new user data will be used in the Persona and Empathy mapping workshops. With new key observations and quotes from the cabin crew we can create more validated assumptions when defining the maps.