Ground in needs of flight attendants

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.

Key contributions — Leading and executing functional designs, design workshops & shadowing, presenter of business demonstration

Main Objectives

Speed up individual tasks speed by 30%

Reduce unnecessary human errors on note and report handover

Improve flight attendants work experience (start from cabin crew)

Outcomes

Based on the cabin simulation MVP

~37%

Tasks speed improved, speed up on flight attendants tasks compared to their original system

~85%

Reduction of human error, huge improvement on cabin journaling and report handover

What We Are Trying To Achieve

While most airlines focus on enhancing the passenger experience, we believe flight attendants play a key role in delivering it. Enhancing information delivery will enable flight attendants to communicate more effectively across different teams, optimizing coordination in real-time working scenarios.

Optimizing flight attendants’ workflow presents a business opportunity to systemise their internal operations and seamlessly adapt them to flights of varying distances. This advancement would set a new benchmark in the airline industry.

Workshops & Shadowing

In our design workshop, we looked closely at the issues the team raised and discovered surprising insights—even flight attendants hadn’t noticed some of them. These findings shaped our key hypotheses and guided the design direction. Lufthansa also gave us a demo journey through a flight attendant’s day, from the morning briefing to the final flight report. This hands-on experience gave us valuable input to strengthen our design.

Insights & Learning Drive Our Decisions

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.

Execution & Collaboration

Cross-functional Sprints

We work closely with the cabin engineer to ensure the product performance and connection in the environment

Design Execution

Define core function specification based on the design direction

Proof of Concept

Evaluating our decision with fully functional product performance

Qualitative Testing

Measuring the impact against our defined objectives

We Made Something Big In Hamburg 🇩🇪

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.

Learning

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.