ONE WORLD
Empowering the airport staffs to get over the manual operational hurdles
In a Nutshell
One world is a mobile application with elements of visual design, branding and user interface design. Its primary goal is to help the staff increase the efficiency of their daily hurdles through communication, learning and by solving their manual operations in an efficient centralised way.
Problem
With the increasing number of mobile applications used by airline staff, there is a greater need for a single platform that facilitates a quick, easy and effective way to communicate and resolve operational hurdles in their daily work activity. The One world is a combination of multiple features such as social tool which is embedded in the daily routine of the airport staff, thus making the process seamless. The primary design principle we established is easy accessibility and easy to use interface that doesn't require training.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
My commitment has been 1 year towards this ongoing project
MAKE OF THE TEAM
The team comprises of 1 Project Manager, 2 UX Designers,1 Business Analyst and 12 Developers.
KEY GOAL
Encourage the staffs to utilise the maximum app feature, make it simple and accessible to use
My Role
I was the only UX Designer solely dedicated to interact with the stakeholders and get the business requirement right
I was involved with the product from the initial stage, conducting brand workshop to set up the tone of the application, validated business requirement, constantly interacted with the stakeholder to get the business logic right and conducted brainstorming discussion to solve the complex logic.
I worked closely with the project manager and the stakeholders to understand the business requirement and enhance the product features, and closely worked with the developers in translating them to the working product.
I worked with the support team after launch to gather information on bug reports and feedback, and continuously worked on improving the accessibility and the performance of the product.
Understanding The User
I followed the User-centred design process to study about the users, identify their pain areas and find the opportunities to improve the user experience
I started by gathering the data about the types of staffs working based on their age group, qualification and the nature of work they were doing.
We as a group of three comprising Business Analyst, Project manager, interviewed approximately 50+ employees across multiple companies, roles and seniorities and conducted group discussion, One on one interviews and observations. We gathered information about the current way of the process, the pain areas, the area of improvement in the current existing product etc.
The user for this product comprises of people from age group 18 - 60, from deskjob workers to field workers, with educational qualification from high school to PhD holders from various asian countries such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and few other more.
User Objectives
After posting 5 strategic questions to the stakeholders and the users, we formulated the insights and findings which included some of the crucial pain points and expectation was to be set up in the new proposed project
Breaking Down The Process
The entire project was run in an agile Human-centred process in order to maintain the timely delivery by always keeping the users in mind
1. Qualitative Interviews - The complex workflows of the multiple user types and their interactions with one another needed to be laid out in detail. In order to achieve that, I gathered as much as I could from the end-users to understand the challenges they face and how they see the app making a difference in optimizing pain areas
2. User Personas - The research made it evident how different users would use the app differently. To cater to this, I categorized them into four user profiles based on their goals and tasks
3. Conceptualization - I started creating information architecture and low-fi concepts for primary use cases. After having a go-ahead from the Product Manager and Stakeholders on the mockups, I began to conduct usability tests with the low-fidelity mockups. Once we had confidence in the design, we began digitalizing designs.
4. Usability Testing - I tested the product during multiple stages of the project such as during the Low fidelity phase, unmoderated internal testing, and user acceptance testing.
These are some Key Insights or Challenges I want to call out
Communication
It's a large airport with more than 50,000 employees using the application, hence the communication is the primary element to make them connected and feel like one world. Building a simple user interface for a social platform is a key challenge.
Work Management
Certain task carried by the airport staffs are manual and a traditional paper method with difficult to track the progress, understanding their business logic was a crucial element as it involves multiple users's sensitive data and process.
Education
The users have to constantly update their knowledge on the work environment and their field of work, the biggest challenge lies in how we deliver the content in gamified way inorder to indulge them in continuous learning.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
Lessons Learned
As a designer, we are often lured by attractive, trendy and out of the box designs. But, We must always remember the ‘why’. The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it.
As the application involves multiple features, the key learning was how to prioritise the primary features from the out of scope requests.
Another key learning was about seeking out early feedback. Keeping the stakeholders/users in loop and testing solutions in whatever form (paper, low-fi or hi-fi) as early as possible saves ample amount of time and re-work.
Understanding the right stakeholder and getting the go-ahead sign for development is another important learning.