User experience architect
Gatwick Airport
Designing content and navigation to meet the needs of the user – increasing engagement and online sales.
Physical and digital
Mapping the problem space
I visited the airport to conduct an analytical walk-through of the traveller's physical journey through the airport. 1-1 interviews with travellers revealed insights that related directly to improvements we could make to the digital experience - creating a more coherent and cohesive physical-digital journey. A key issue, at the airport itself and on the website, was orientation. Customers always felt slightly lost and confused, which is not a good state of mind for decision-making or buying services.
Helping customers feel confident and certain instead of anxious and confused became a key design objective.
Mental models
Flows and personas
From the contextual interviews and discovery walk around the physical airport site, I documented the key user journeys and personas. These were used to inform all subsequent design thinking and decision-making, and helped our work and approach for client stakeholders and senior management.
Understanding user mental models of using an airport gave us a framework for content and navigation on the new website.
Content audit
Mapping the digital journeys and assessing the information provided at each stage
The old site contained a lot of good, re-usable content. But, over time, it had snowballed and become neglected, with repeated and redundant information and links, and had become almost impossible to navigate. All of this meant that useful information was buried, and people were not finding it - let alone acting on it.
Analysis work revealed 'link-spaghetti', and a multitude of different widget styles, which the customer would have to learn and understand.
Creating user-focused content
Finding organising principles and distilling, visualising and making interactive: making the content work for the user, not the other way around.
The site had a great deal of scattered content, forcing the user to dig and hunt, then do the hard work of remembering, comparing and processing what they had seen.
I mapped all the content to researched mental models, allowing the site to organise itself around the user. This did a lot of the processing work on behalf of the user and made the site feel simpler and more useful.
From the 20+ pages of car parking information above, I first edited and distilled the content. Then, I created this decision tree to act as an organiser, or 'look-ahead' tool.
The map gives an overview of the content, organised around the main user goals of flying out, picking up, or dropping off:
... and with the content mapped and organised according to goal and task, creating an interactive tool seemed an obvious, and easy next step.
Ideation
Sketching, exploring, testing
Ideation for the new site was centred around the research insights.
Steps 1–3 below trace the genesis of the 'All About You' idea, where all content is personalised around the flight number. The flight number is the unifying piece of data that links all airport visitors, all user types, and all user journeys.
The example below shows a progression of thinking from information architecture through to interaction design and content design, with thinking in each informing the other.
Step 1
Information architecture
Mapping user routes and options according to situations and inputs gave the underlying structure for a more personalised and tailored view of content, organised around the one thing that's relevant for all airport users: the flight number.
Step 2
Helping the customer
Showing how auto-suggest can be used to help travellers locate the correct flight number, as remembering the flight number was highlighted as a problem during the 1-1 conversations I had during the research phase.
Step 3
Displaying the content
An experimental content viewer. If the flight number given is a departure, for example, then all content associated with arrivals is filtered out. The user's pathway to relevant (and profit-making) content is much easier and quicker.
Evolutionary / sacrificial sketching
Some ideas are better than others. An early concept for site nav arranged content around the traveller's journey from home, to the airport, and beyond. A few of us liked the idea but it meant that 'At the Airport' came half way along the navigation bar, whereas the vast majority of user test subjects expected it to be first in line, occupying the traditional 'Home' page position.
Early thinking also explored using the layout of the airport as a navigation framework, with a view to making digital and physical experiences feel more coherent.
Testing ideas
Objective: Identify and understand users' pain points; evaluate and validate assumptions and new ideas for navigation and content.
Method: Contextual interview / Treejack tests
I built prototypes to test ideas and explore new ones. I loaded them onto an iPad and spent days testing with real users at Departures and Arrivals at Gatwick.
Key concepts probed during research were:
Relationships between navigation at the airport, and on the web.
Organising content around users' journey stages: getting to the airport;airport hotel;at the airport; and onward travel and accommodation/
Summarising large amounts of detailed information and presenting it more simply, and personalised around user selections.
Before
A multitude of pages and steps to find, traverse and understand before booking an airport car park.
After
A single, self-contained parking widget that could be used across the site and which used progressive disclosure to show relevant content when it was needed.
Before
Disorganised, inconsistent navigation and scattered calls to action.
After
Wireframe to demonstrate drastically decluttered content, with emphasis placed on calls to action.
Content across the site was given parallel treatment so that planning, bokking and buying journeys looked and felt similar.
The result
A fully responsive website with a brand new navigation structure that both new and existing customers loved for its simplicity.
Engagement and sales at the site were drastically improved.
Content was reduced in quantity, making it easier and quicker to maintain.
Many aspects of the work are still live, over 5 years later. The Check-In decision tree that I created to organise online content was turned into physical signage and placed in departures to help guide visitors.
