International Wayfinding
Company: Delta Air Lines | Date: September 2019
Flying internationally is tough, especially when you land and can’t read the language that all of the airport signs are in. Our team worked with the SeaTac International Airport in Seattle, WA to create a simple, easy to read print out on how to navigate the airport, that could be translated into any language.
Role: Experience Designer & Intern Manager
Technology used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Background
When a customer lands in a foreign county, isn’t familiar with the airport, and can’t speak the local language, it can cause an immense amount of stress for passengers.
This project was focusing on understanding internationally traveling customers and how best to accommodate them. We focused on the Los Angeles, CA airport as it is one of the more confusing ones in Delta’s network of airports.
I worked on this project with a strategist/project manager and two different groups of interns.
User Research
With this project, we conducted the following primary research to better understand our customers:
Interviewed over 25 expatriates of various backgrounds
Observed 2 disembarkations of planes arriving from Seoul and Paris
Observed two flights worth of passengers navigate through the Seattle, Washington airport
We learned from these sessions that a lot of internationally traveling passengers are more likely to also be first time or infrequent fliers, which only adds to the stress of the unknown at the airport.
From our learnings, we decided to develop a paper card that could be translated into all languages, printed out, and handed to customers as left the airplane.
Final Designs
Front
Back
Outcomes
We decided on a paper card rather than a digital solution as many of our internationally traveling passengers either don’t have a smart phone or internet connection to use the FlyDelta app or they prefer paper boarding passes over digital.
We deployed this card for flights coming into the LAX airport in the summer of 2018. From gathered metrics from customers at this time, DAL’s ‘Wayfinding’ specific Net Promoter score rose 9% during the month that the cards were deployed.