Designing a faster self baggage drop-off experience
✍🏼 Project
UX design of self baggage drop-off kiosk of Turkish Airlines in the new Istanbul Airport
👩🏼 Role
UX Designer
⏳ Timeline
1 week (in 2018)
🎨 Tools
Sketch, Invision
How I got involved in this project?
I was working as a UX designer at a creative design agency, Efabrika. There I started working with Turkish Airlines, one of the largest carriers in the airline industry by the number of passenger destinations worldwide. During my work time there, I had the chance to design the UX of many Turkish Airlines mediums both internal and external. Among them, self baggage drop-off was the biggest and most exciting one in terms of that it’s used by thousands of passengers from all around the world each day. And it was the first product that I designed that I and many people around me also became a user of.
My responsibilities
As the only UX designer, my role included user research, user flow, UX design, interaction design, prototyping, and working with the UI and motion designers.
Understanding the context
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Problem
1. The baggage drop-off process was all manual and human interaction was a must.
2. The number of staff is limited.
3. The passengers’ waiting time in the lines are too long.
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Solution
1. Design a self-operating baggage drop-off kiosk.
2. Reduce the waiting time in the queue.
3. Decrease human interaction dependency.
Project requirements from the client
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The default languages of the application should be Turkish and English.
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If the user selects another language, the selected language should be displayed together with Turkish.
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The design should be suitable for a 19-inch display and a resolution of 1280 x1024.
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The time the user spends at the device should be aimed at a minimum.
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Intelligibility should be at the highest level.
Design goals
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Faster and simpler baggage drop off experience
So that the passengers can check-in their baggage without waiting in a long line
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Smooth process with minimum human interaction
Lower the chances of user mistakes
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Works for everyone
Easy steps to follow for novice and not tech-savvy users
Target audience
The biggest challenge of this project was to define the target audience since it contains a huge population of travelers.
A quantitive fact: in 2017, 95m people visited the airports in Istanbul. This means that thousands of people fly and do their check-ins at kiosks each day.
After some research and reading about how to design for large audiences, I started to classify the users in terms of their age and the frequency they travel in 3 groups:
🧒🏻
Travelers who are 16-24 years old
tech-savvy
occasional travelers
👩🏽🦱
Travelers who are 25-55 years old
frequent travelers
mostly tech-savvy
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Travelers who are more than 55
occasional travelers
less tech-savvy
Some facts:
1. Self bag drop-off kiosk was going to be used only at the new Istanbul Airport (for the beginning)
2. An average person takes 6 flights a year
3. There is another airport in Istanbul, so there is a good chance that these passengers might fly from the other airport. This lowers the average flight number per person from the new Istanbul Airport.
Key takeaways:
1. There will be many passengers who will use the kiosk for the first time for a long period of time after the airport is officially opened.
2. The passengers will have no chance to learn/memorize the flow since there will be gaps between back-to-back travels.
3. As a result, the cognitive load should be very low and the process should be discoverable and approachable.
User flow
Combining the client’s requirements with the key takeaways from the user research, I came up with this user flow:
One of my main goals was to minimize human interaction and let the kiosk do most of the work by itself. So in this user flow, the users don’t need to take any actions unless they want to change the system’s language or their baggage weight exceeds their allowance. Otherwise, it proceeds by itself and let the user know in which step the process is.
Wireframes
I created the following wireframes meeting both the design goals and the client’s goals:
1
First Turkish then the passenger’s language are always visible at the same time since Turkish speaking staff might help the foreign passengers.
2
Language option button should be visually most prominent since most of the travelers are foreign and from all around the world.
3
The necessary actions are shown in animated GIFs.
4
The baggage weight is the most important information on the screen since it affects the further actions.
5
The passengers are informed about the process during the wait time.
6
They are also informed about the progress they made so far.
Final thoughts and conclusion
This was the first project that I designed for such a big audience and I had very limited time (only 1 week) to finish. It was challenging but I learned where to start for designing for a huge population of users which helped me a lot designing for the Turkish Ministry of Interior and all of its sub institutions.
Check out the Behance page of the project made by the talented UI Designer Cihangir Ozis:
Turkish Airlines Self Baggage Drop-off Kiosk | Behance