Ground in needs of flight attendants
This project began with a design workshop for Lufthansa, which identified various problems with flight attendants' working routines. The project aimed to develop a new working system for flight attendants to improve their performance.
Context
Problem
Flight attendants are assigned to specific seat areas, managing both passenger needs and aircraft components. However, without a dedicated communication system, they must move through the cabin to relay requests and share information. This lack of coordination leads to inefficiencies, unnecessary tasks, and wasted time.
Opportunity
Optimizing flight attendants’ workflow presents a business opportunity to systemize their internal operations and seamlessly adapt them to flights of varying distances. This advancement would set a new benchmark in the airline industry.
Who are we design for?
While most airlines focus on enhancing the passenger experience, but we believe flight attendants play a key role in delivering it. We believe that enhancing information delivery will enable flight attendants to communicate more effectively across different teams, optimizing coordination in real-time working scenarios.
Research
Workshops & Interview
During the design workshop, we delved deeper into specific issues they had mentioned. In the process, we uncovered intriguing insights—even flight attendants hadn’t noticed some of these points. These findings helped us shape key hypotheses, guiding our design direction.
Shadowing
Lufthansa provided us with a demo journey to offer a deeper insight into the daily operations of flight attendants, from the morning briefing to submitting the flight report after landing. This hands-on experience gave us valuable evidence and criteria to inform and strengthen our design for the functionality.
Position | Pain point | Insight |
|---|---|---|
👩✈️ Flight attendant | “We used to go over different groups to ask for help if needed as we cannot be bothered to used the central call” | Communication |
👨✈️ Flight attendant | “We are using a paper list for any special note, and the list changes all the time but we can’t make sure if everyone got the updated note. Sometimes we made error because of it.” | CommunicationDocumentation |
👩✈️ Flight attendant | “We need to submit a journey report after landing but we might have no chance for taking notes, so we need to remember everything in their head and fill in the report after the flight” | DocumentationRecommendation |
👨💼 Passenger manager | “When passengers wanted to change their sit, we need to ask if there are any empty sit. But sometimes we are not sure about it because we don’t if other colleague had already take the sit.” | Communication |
👨🔧 Cabin consultant | “We use walkie-talkie to communicate at the moment, but sometimes it is hard for flight attendants to spot out the technical issue specifically to the engineer team during the security check.” | Communication |
Hypothesis & ideation
We gained valuable insights into flight attendants’ work situations by analyzing each step and detail of their tasks. This deeper understanding allowed us to explore their behaviors across different scenarios, helping us identify key patterns and challenges.
Affordance and Control
The mapping between functions and affordances provide a right level of difficulty for flight attendants to take actions. That contribute the user experience of how they interact with their device in specific scenario.
Action and Feedback
Communication becomes challenging when flight attendants are divided into groups of up to six. Implementing a hierarchical structure can streamline message delivery, ensuring that information reaches the right person directly and that feedback is received as quickly as possible.
Principal and Criteria
Flight attendants constantly use their hands for various tasks, making it impractical to carry an iPad at all times. They need a solution that is…
Easy to carry
They need a tool that they can carry around when they are working. Also their hands needed to be free so they can keep working on their stuffs.
Easy to control
A complex control for them is a nightmare when they are busy. Therefore a minimum control for different actions is needed.
Provide quick information
A precise and specific information is needed when flight attendants are in particular situation. It’s painful for them to carry and use a paper list all the time.
Outcome
In order to demonstrate the most realistic situation in the cabin environment, we consulted with the cabin expert and development team to define key specifications and limitations. We then developed an MVP for flight attendants, allowing them to showcase the design through a simulation from their base in Hamburg.
Notification and Gesture
Simple notifications with distinct taptic patterns allow flight attendants to receive messages instantly and respond quickly without the need for complex actions. By using a specific gesture combined with a physical button, they can also trigger an emergency alert at the appropriate level, even when the device screen is no longer reliable.
A Visual Journey
Displaying the total flight hours along with a breakdown of the journey helps flight attendants quickly assess and review their work schedule. Additionally, the device automatically records all actions taken during the flight, eliminating the need for attendants to remember every detail when filling out the report after landing.
Recording and Exporting
The flight journey report is often a challenging task for flight attendants, they must submit it after landing. With the new design pattern, the watch system can now automatically track their itinerary, actions, and any relevant flags. These records are then synced to their iPad, allowing flight attendants to focus on their duties during the flight without the need to remember all the details or complete the report afterward.
Results
Although the demonstration was only a simulation, the performance of the tasks clearly showed improvements in the following areas, validating our hypothesis based on the functionality’s effectiveness.
37% Faster
Tasks speed improved
There are tasks for flight attendants to complete with the demo. They finished the task 37% faster compared to their original system.
2 Mistakes
Errors reduced
While we cannot use this number as a definitive reference since it’s only a demonstration, the results are promising. With the new functions, we recorded only two mistakes across all tasks from two groups of flight attendants. This represents a significant improvement, particularly in the flight report generation section.
What’s Next
We would like to know how the design work in real situation but it is impossible to test it in one of their existing flight journey as it is too risky. Therefore, cabin consultant team suggest us to do another Internal simulation with a shadowing for a bigger scale flight, so we can evaluate the design based on,
If there are any technical issue in the cabin, which would affect the product performance.
If those functions work effectively in different scale of the flight, we might need to simplify it based on short flight hours, and smaller cabin with less flight attendant groups.
If there are any unseen error from the demonstration, which is out of the tasks and hidden in the flight journey.
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