Pink Air: From Anywhere to Everywhere
We are fast. We are connected. We are an app that can revolutionize the way we perceive air travel.
Pink Air has this vision: link numerous cities across Europe and beyond, with a new way to perceive the classic flight booking system.
Either for a business trip or a vacation to your dreamland, all you need is specify your destination.
The software will present you a range of nearby airports to choose from, all displayed on a single screen.
With all the possible routes to reach your special place, you can truly go “From Anywhere, to Everywhere”.
Our company, Pink Air, truly believes in a human-centered travel experience, right from the beginning, when you’re choosing your flight.
That’s why our app is crafted with the finest UX design techniques. We are for a booking experience that is simple, intuitive, fast, built to get ready and enjoy your travel adventures.
App's Detail: Home Page, Flight Selection Card, Logo, Tagline
But here's the twist: neither the app nor the company actually exists. Pink Air it’s ethereal, nothing more than an idea or a conceptual project.
From my point of view an interesting way to explain, step by step, how UX process can be applied in an innovative context.
From the scratch: what do we mean for UX Process?
In fact, Pink Air it’s my final project at the UX Design Institute of Dublin, where I pursued the Professional Diploma in UX Design, university credit-rated by the Caledonian University of Glasgow.
Talking about design, whether professionals or not, we mistakenly think only about the creative aspect. In our minds design is conceptualized as architecture, digital interfaces, in some way a work of art.
However, many of us overlook the intricate process that lies behind the final art project. For me, coming from a technical and engineering world, it’s something really changed my vision after the Diploma.
If you’re not following the process, you’re not really doing design. You’re not doing UX.
Design process is divided in three main phases: Research, Analysis and, only at the end, the Design solution.
Even after any phase of the process, is worth underline the importance of further testing and research, creating, in this way, a loop.
There are multiple ways for explaining that, like IBM's Design Thinking model, Zendesk Triple Diamond or, as I learned at the UX Design Insitute, a Research Loop.
IBM's Design Thinking model: The Loop
Zendesk Diamond model
Reinterpretation of what I learned at the UX Design Institute: The Research Loop model
1) Research Phase
This journey begins with an intensive research phase, looking for a deeply understanding of the subject (air travel) and, most importantly, user behaviour during the booking process.
This section is crucial. Without any user research we could be led by misconceptions, stereotypes and personal biases, when the only that matters are data.
“In god we trust, all the others bring data” - W. Edwards Deming
Both quantitative and qualitative data are collected with a variety of techniques and tools, all reminding us that we are not the target user:
Competitive Benchmarking:
I studied strengths, weaknesses and best practices of already established products on the market.
It was also an opportunity to “steal” some promising ideas for the future development of Pink Air.
Survey:
It’s the first time I engaged with users. I started noticing some hints for the idea that would, at the end, become Pink Air’s unique value proposition.
Particularly, when I asked openly how responders would improve flight apps, someone suggested: "I would add a feature to check for near airports, looking for other suitable options".
While surveys are a valuable technique, also like others as Card Sorting or A/B testing, to collect high quality qualitative data I couldn’t overlook another technique…
Usability Tests:
Interviews, where users are asked to interact with a product or a specific feature.
Write about these tests would require an entirely different article, as they are the specialty of UX researchers, but I would reduce that saying that the primary focus is on observing user behaviours, objectives and reactions.
It’s still an interview, but it’s vital to observe rather than asking for user opinions. As a well-known anthropologist said:
"What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things" – Margaret Mead
2) Analysis Phase
Even if talking about data and numbers, the interpretation of the results collected during the Research phase is one of the most artistic aspects of the UX process.
Designers need intuition and talent to give a personal understanding, giving structure and clarity to the information at hand.
Affinity Diagram:
A technique that comes from Japanese management practices, useful to visualize and categorize all the available information.
I also often use this method to organize myself and brainstorming.
And there's an important point to highlight: All the stakeholders are actively involved.
They are made aware of the previous research and everybody, ideally from the junior to the CEO, meet in front of a whiteboard.
Each participant writes down their observation on a post-it, focusing on its personal point of view about the data gathered.
After all the post-it are sticked to the board, a collaborative effort is made to create logical groups for each note, naming as valuable categories (e.g. usercomments, navigation issues, layout problems, etc…).
For my project, I had the unique opportunity to be invited to a professional hotel school in Trieste, AD Formandum.
Here, I discussed the importance of CX (Customer Experience) in tourism and service sectors.
Given the project's focus on a flight app, I involved the students in my affinity diagram’s realization.
Affinity Diagram made with AD Formandum's students
Customer Journey:
Mapping user’s interaction with the application or service, can beuseful to highlight up and downs of its engagement, and get a first concrete visualization of the data.
We can see that as a sentiment diagram, where we can easily find the areas where we need a design correction.
3) Design Phase
Now we get into the most "exciting" phase: crafting the design solution.
But before diving into digital design and sketching out the screens, there's a previous step: the creation of flow diagrams.
Based on our previous work, we need to have clear ideas on how many pages are on the app and how these are connected to each other.
In other words, before we design the interface, we must design user’s interaction.
In designing Pink Air, I followed all the best practices and design patterns gained during the course, but the idea behind my project was built on two useful insights obtained during my Research phase:
1) Users, before booking a flight, use apps as price comparators.
2) They are willing to depart from different airports, but often the process of going back and comparing the ideal route and price is too long and confusing.
I identified also challenges typical of flight apps, such as poor calendar management, difficulties in flight selection or confusion over fare structures.
After a brainstorming the Pink Air solution emerged: the app would previously obtain user's location and suggest flights from any nearby airport.
I was finally ready to sketch my solution, find my look-and-feel and, obviously, digitalize a prototype (for my project, a medium-fidelity version, with only a single use case covered), a solution that allows stakeholders and users (for further testing) to interact with the app.
Only once is approved the project is given to programmers, a phase where the designer must assure that every little detail is clear for the development team.
UX is a lot more than catchy interfaces
I also created a logo and a tagline as a creative exercise, working on app’s branding.
Detail on the creation of the flamingo inside the logo
But here’s my closing thought: a company's brand isn't just its logo, tagline, or visual elements, but it’s the result of meticulous planning, consistency and is more a customer-centered concept than a company representation.
"Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room." – Jeff Bezos
That’s the same for UX and UI. It’s a lot more than the graphical elements of an app. The prototype is catchy, but to truly practice UX you need every single phase the process: Research, Analysis and Design.
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