Overview
AirAsia is the largest low cost carrier in Malaysia, founded by Tony Fernandez in 1993.
AirAsia’s flexible and low pricing has been driving people to fly with them. And their so-famous tagline has becoming realistic, “Now everyone can fly”.
Airline used to be expensive, and ever since AirAsia was established, it solves people’s problem to fly and travel overseas/outstation in the cheapest way possible.
What I have observed in the past few years with AirAsia is that to keep the cost relatively low, the company is also working towards earning more revenue and saving costs. Also, the number of passengers kept on growing, to the fact that they occupied almost the whole airport terminal KLIA 2.
To this date, Airasia is still innovating and continue to make people’s overseas journey much smoother by providing automation. One of their latest innovation is the self check-in kiosk.
It is believed that this technology was developed with assistance from Aldan Technology, a company specialises in providing self-service kiosk.
Although this kind of kiosk can be found in many other airline, AirAsia is the only one strongly require a passenger to check in via kiosk. No check in with receptionist is allowed. Even when you have any checked in baggage, you have to print luggage tag yourself and scan the luggage yourself as well. There is very little human /manual interaction here.
As a UI/UX Designer, it interests me to explore more about this self service kiosk. Therefore, I decided to give it a try and do a UX case study about it.
You may view the UI and see the whole process in this video.
Problem
Although I think it is very smart of AirAsia to provide such automation, I do think it still comes with a few problems. One of the problems is the UI/UX of the kiosk which makes the queue take a very long time to move and left people confused.
It all started when I drop my mom at KLIA 2 airport the other day and I help her to do the check in as she is a senior citizen and have a hard time seeing screen (which this is one of the problems with self check-in kiosk), so while I was waiting in line, I counted the number of people confused and not knowing how to go about with it. Many are impatiently waiting as it takes a very long time for one person to complete this task.
My Goal
My goal in this UX Case study is to improve my sense of UI/UX, solve the confusion with the help of UI/UX, and make this kiosk easily accessible even by senior citizen.
Audience
The audience of Airasia are very wide, which may include :
Young adult, Adult, senior citizens, and adult with kids.
Process 1 : Direct User Observation
I started this study case by observing my surroundings.
I look around and see how people interact with the screen. Some people are already familiar with it, yet some people are very confused with it. The familiar ones interact just as intended. While the confused ones may include : infrequent traveller, senior citizen, and family with kids.
One man, looks like around 40 year old, clicked on “CANCEL” button 3 times as he does not understand whatever’s written on the screen when this page shows up.
One pair of Chinese men does not know what to do when the same mentioned screen appears and kept on asking each other during the whole process and the other guy doesn’t know what to do as well, therefore they kept on clicking “CANCEL” as well.
Most of the people who can interact with it seamlessly are young adults and seems to be a frequent traveller (on business or an avid tourist)
I , too, try to interact with it myself. And I noticed how I took a long time to know what to press next as this is new to me as well. I even failed to print baggage tag once as the machine ran out of ink/paper but doesn’t seem to inform me anything about it.
Process 2 : UI Observation
So the next step is to take a look at the full UI and have it re-designed.
I did not manage to record me doing it due to the long queue, but I found the exact same screens being featured by AirAsia on their website.
Here are some of my comments on the screens :
1. On the onboarding screen, There are way too many options and the risk is that it may lead user to not pick the language first and then end up in the language they don’t understand.
2. Every button looks exactly the same. There is no clear hierarchy in every page.
3. When there is a technical problem, it does not inform the user. Instead, it lets the process ongoing and deemed it as complete.
4. In the baggage tag section, it is unnecessary to let the user key in the number of bags they have in the keypad form. This feels like information input instead of inserting the amount.
There are also a number of UI errors like the placement and consistency.
Process 3 : Mockup Creation
After replaying the UI, I have better judgement on what to fix and what to keep.
The most important thing to fix is actually the buttons. By making the buttons have hierarchy, it might be easier to understand.
The second fix I did was narrowing down the options in the beginning of the page. So user must select the language they are familiar with, only they may proceed to check in/print luggage tag etc.
The third fix I did was improve the copy to make it much clearer to the user, what might happen next and what is happening at the moment as well. It is important to let the user know which state they are in and what’s going to happen next.
The last fix is to improve the readability of the boarding pass, which I think could further assist the passenger in finding the information they are looking for.
The Redesigned
Here are some of the screen mockups :
This is how the user flow look like in overview:
You may interact with the prototype here (only available in English and Bahasa Indonesia) :
Comments and feedbacks are very welcomed!
If you have any, don't be shy to click the CHAT button below and talk :)
See you in my next blog post!
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