DESIGN

As someone who’s travelled to 108 countries & territories so far, while flying 35-40 airlines from 6 continents, I’ve had the chance to study airline boarding passes to great lengths, not only during layovers between flights, but also later, at home. 

Being a travel & design aficionado, I go as far as keeping all boarding passes and catalogue them by various criteria, comparing the designs between airlines.

In my opinion, too few airlines pay attention and consideration to the design of their boarding pass. Lately, even the branding colours and the logo have disappeared from some ticket designs. Below is a an example from Malaysia Airlines (until recently one of the only few 5-star airlines in the world, according to Skytrax ratings) and another from ANA All Nippon Airlines, still a 5-star airline.

As one can easily notice, not much consideration is given to the hierarchy of information or the grouping of similar elements. In fact, the data seems haphazardly printed on both these tickets.

With examples like these, it’s honestly pretty easy to create something significantly better, as even a modicum of attention to detail would generate an improved experience.

First, let’s look at the prototype below. I divided the boarding pass in 3 equal sections, framed by 2 bands of equal size at each end, which I will address later (note that one of the bands is tearable).

Now, let’s ask ourselves what are the 3 main important things to know about your flight when you are at the airport, after you just checked in. Based on my research, these are:

1. General information about your flight
2. How to get to the gate on time
3. What to do when boarding the plane 

In other words: General Info, Pre-Boarding, and Boarding. 

In fact, as you already know your own name, where you’re flying and what date it is, the first section is more useful for the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) officers and personnel who double check the boarding pass before entering the passport control area. 

However, an increasing number of these officers are nowadays equipped with scanners that gather all the information from the same barcode scanned by the flight attendants when boarding the plane.

General Information

Personally, I would prefer to only display the passenger info as the initial of the first name + last name (in this case, “D. Vuia”) for privacy reasons. Far too often, as people wait in line to board the plane, they keep these passes in full view, with all their names flashed boldly for prying eyes to see. For this example, however, will leave it as full first & last names.

The really important piece of information in this section is the flight number, as this is the one detail the traveller needs to know prior to starting the process of getting to the gate, as he/she checks the monitors for additional information, and also to see if the flight is on time, has any delays, or if the gate has changed.

One of the improvements in this design is displaying the flight number with the original airline (in this case – Air France AF374) but also the codeshare flight KL0681 (in this case, a KLM flight). When checking the status monitors, one will notice that a flight may be displayed in 3 or 4 formats, depending on the codeshare agreements with the partner airlines. It can be something like this, however these codes would be displayed alternatively, not all at once:

AF0374 / KL0681 / DL5672

It is sometimes beneficial to have at least the second format printed on the boarding pass, as passengers often stare at the monitor visibly confused, when they see the destination and time of departure, but not the flight number they were originally familiar with.

Pre-Boarding

This is the main area of focus for any traveller before they get to the gate. The boarding time and terminal/gate numbers are the most important pieces of data and therefore they should be emphasized. I see some boarding passes having the departure time printed, but that might create confusion, and make the passenger think that’s the time when they should arrive at the gate (which, obviously, would be far too late).

A clever basic map could be added, to help orient the passenger with regards to the direction of their gate, in relation to the security area / passport control. Also, having the sentence “average walking time to your gate after passing through security” followed by a blank row for the variable [time] printed so that the passenger would know how many extra minutes to allow for that journey, would definitely decrease the chance of tardiness. Sometimes, it might take 20 or more minutes to walk to the gate. Add to that a stop to the bathroom or a tired child, and it can become half an hour.

Boarding

So, you arrived safely at the gate, with time to spare. If it’s a large airplane, you will notice a few rows set up at the gate, with large numbers above them, usually from 1 to 5. This is the Boarding Sequence.

Airlines have finally realized that filling an airplane should be done as filling a bottle: from the bottom, up. If you invite the passengers in rows 1 to 20 to board first (assuming Economy starts at row 1 in this example), all passengers situated in rows 21 and higher would later have to crawl over the ones already boarded, as they arrange their suitcases and fuss around.

It’s best to start boarding with the rows in the back of the plane, and move towards the front. Of course, the Premium Economy, Business, First Class and passengers with children are awarded priority above all else.

The example above highlights the most important detail to remember: your seat number. It also tells you where it is located (by the window in this case), displays a small icon with a yellow dot to show on which side and which area of the plane your seat is located, and finally, shows a snippet of a map with your seat highlighted, similar to the ones online when you are given the choice to select your seat.

(For this example, I used a snippet with only a 2-2 seat configuration, but in reality, a flight from Paris to Vancouver would have a 2-4-2 or a 3-3-3 configuration to be precise).

Below all that – the infamous barcode – containing all your sensitive information, used by the gate and flight personnel to identify you.

Side bars

And now, on to the side bars, one of which is tearable. All current boarding passes have a section that is about a third of the original length of the ticket that can be torn away, which contains essentially the same information as the rest of pass. This is the stub, which you get to keep and show to the flight attendants, as they direct you to your seat when you get on the plane.

This design reduces the tearable stub to only a fraction of the original length, and adds another one at the other end, displaying vital information such as the Flight Number, Boarding Time, Gate and Seat Number vertically.

Why is that? So that when the boarding pass sits in your passport, you do not have to take it out to review the info. You can just glimpse at it at any point.

Oh, wait, but where is the branding + logo in all this? Well, as I mentioned before, more and more airlines choose to go with the generic black and white ticket, and a logo in an outlined font. In this case, the colour of the side stubs could be the airline’s branding colour and the logo displayed on the verso.

Another option is to use one of the stubs (the non-tearable one) for this purpose. Either way, the option is there. I will leave that to the airline to decide 🙂

A format for creating systematic mash-ups to generate many wide-ranging ideas is known as a Creative Matrix.

It is a concept ideation technique used in UX and Interaction Design.

Quick guide to building a Creative Matrix:

• On a whiteboard, draw a large grid, with no more than 5 rows and 5 columns, then identify each column headings, whether by categories or personas.
  
  
• For the rows, identify enablers, such as technological, cultural, etc. 
  
  
• Invite various teams from different disciplines within the company and have them work simultaneously, filling each cell with ideas.
  
  
• Think about the intersections of these, writing one idea per sticky note (name, description, etc.)
  
  
• This exercise should not take more than 15 minutes, however the team members should be encouraged to generate as many ideas as possible during this time.

Among the many benefits for using a Creative Matrix are:

• It’s great for “mining” market opportunities
• Facilitates greater collaboration among various teams
• Promotes divergent thinking
• Helps respective team members generate a wide variety of ideas quickly

This blog post first appeared on the City of Vancouver’s SAP intranet in 2011, and it was written in order to facilitate understanding among its employees regarding this up and coming field.

First off, what is an “infographic”? 

People still ask me this question and for good reason: although the concept has been around since the first humans started drawing representations of their surroundings on the walls of caves, the term however is still widely unknown, with most people spelling it as two words – ‘info” & “graphic”. Other terms that have emerged lately, only add further to the confusion: diagraphics, videographics, etc. So, to put it simply – an infographic is a visual representation of information, data or knowledge.

The main goal of an infographic is to communicate information in a clear and effective manner, while engaging the viewer with visual elements that transform the act of reading a page into a whole new experience. Infographics can be used to display step-by-step processes, signs, manuals, presentations, maps, worksheets, statistics, reports, tracking tools.

The traditional way of presenting information is by writing a document (or a web page) and let the audience interpret it – hopefully in the manner intended by the author. People – however – are very visual by nature and would much rather see a sketch of a process then reading a very lengthy (and sometimes very technical) block of text. Think about it – the earliest forms of written expression began as pictographs and hieroglyphs.

Infographics can be presented by themselves – hence replacing a whole page, or in conjunction with an article (in which case it helps to further emphasize the information on that page). In some instances, more than one page can be replaced by an intuitive infographic, which saves the content strategist assigned with rewriting those pages a lot of time and saves the user from having to read through all the lengthy paragraphs.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that many of our site users do not have English as their first language. Some visit the City website even before they move to Canada, using it to decide if Vancouver will be the right choice for them. Others use it after they already established here, in search for information that is vital to their quick and smooth integration in the society. For these residents, following a page written even in the most basic English language can sometimes be a challenge. They can overlook important information or misunderstand certain facts. An simple infographic proves to be the most effective way of displaying all sorts of information and data in this case.

Each day, more and more companies realize the potential of this discipline and make it an integral part of their online presence, which proves to be very beneficial to all parties involved, as it greatly improves the user-experience and therefore gets the message across more effectively.

Without further due, please view the example below, which is a simple approach to an otherwise tedious process of understanding how to get a picnic permit.