AirMeal-UX/UI Case Study

These days people prefer to fly down to multiple places— be it for work or for a holiday. Therefore, a new change in the inflight food ordering experience could make a difference. In the market, till date, there is no such app that helps the user to order in-flight food and make their flying experience worthwhile. Currently, the user repeatedly calls the air hostess when he wants to have something.

The Brief

1. Make in-flight services available to passengers on their mobile devices.
2. In-flight food and drink services are manual, or limited to the headrest entertainment console.
3. Design a way for passengers to access these services through an app or website.

The Assumptions

1. Passengers can access the app on their mobile phones using the flight wiFi.
2. Passengers should have a their flight and related travel details handy.

The Problem

The in-flight food and drink ordering system is a tedious task. The passengers face anxiety in waiting for service and receiving items. Flight attendants would like to meet a passenger’s needs in a timely matter, but find it difficult with the many passengers they must serve.

The Aim

Passengers would like to request services and amenities, so the availability and accessibility of the services should be the priority making their journey a memorable one. The main goal is to make the in-flight food and drink ordering service hassle free for the passengers during their journey.

To begin with, I started with deciding the target audience for the AirMeal App. After a lot of study, I arrived at a conclusion and identified a ‘Regular Traveller’ as my main target audience no matter in which class he/she is travelling in.

Once, I identified my target audience, I needed more clarity on the features that should be offered to the users via this app. For better understanding, I followed an approach started with taking user interviews for research purposes to converting my research into a user flow and creating the wireframes which were further converted into visual designs.

Phase I : Research and User Interviews

To begin with my research and get a better understanding to decide the feature of AirMeal, I conducted a few user interviews of the users who belonged to my target audience. Once, all the interviews were completed, I designed the user persona which highlighted the pain points and needs of the user.

Findings from the user interviews:

The findings from the user interviews I took were as follows:

1. To order food and drinks while on a journey in an airplane, user has to repeated call the air-hostess and ask her about the food and beverage items they and the price of the corresponding item.
2. The current process of ordering food and drink in the airplane is a tedious process and takes a lot of time, often resulting in bad decisions made by the passengers. The reason behind bad decision is nothing but the pressure they feel while ordering because of not being able to order what they eventually wanted to had.
3. Talking about the airlines perspective, having an app like AirMeal would help the saving time and energy in explaining the passengers the entire menu with all the related details. Saved energy and time will eventually lead to increasing focus on serving food and drinks to the passengers
4. If we talk about the current scenario (due to Covid-19) amid this pandemic, an app like AirMeal would be helpful because the traditional menu cards will not be appreciated by all the passengers (Reason: Everyone touches the same menu card repeatedly and hence, leading to increased chances of getting infected).

User Persona

Phase II : User Flow and Feature Deciding

Now, since I was clear with the users needs and pain points, the next step was to decide the features of the app and design the user flow. I believe that customer satisfaction is the key aspect behind the success of a product. And the product features depend entirely on the users and target audience. I try to meet the expectations of my users by delivering the most suitable product with a hassle-free user experience. If the product doesn’t meet the users satisfaction, it will lead to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied users don’t use the product again and gradually the audience and users of the app tend to decrease. Hence, I tried keeping all the features that users expected.

Features of the App:

1. Easy User Experience.
2. Hassle-free login experience.
3. Search option where the users can search for the desired food items.
4. Different food categories for easy food ordering process.
5. Top Rated food items are showcased for the user to choose amongst the most loved food items by the passengers.
6. A completely different section to showcase the special food items and drinks for the day.
7. For future reference of the order placed by the user during his/her journey, the order receipt will be emailed to the passenger.

User Flow:

A smooth experience is always the key aspect for a product. Hence, keeping the users’ ease as the top-most priority, I created the user flow for the main functionality of the app.

User flow: In-flight Food Ordering

User Flow: Search food items

Phase III : Wire-framing

Once I designed the user flow, I did paper wire-framing followed by creating Hi-Fi Wireframes of the flow. The Hi-Fi wireframes gave me a better clarity of how AirMeal would look like.

High Fidelity Wireframes

Phase IV : Visual Designing

Now that the wire-framing was completed, the last phase was to define the style guide and decide the primary and secondary colours to begin the visual design of AirMeal. But, that wasn’t it. I had to finalise the typeface and the logo too.

I began designing the logo and exploring various fonts. I created the logo with consisting of the primary and secondary colours. The primary colour used in AirMeal was a shade of yellow (#FDAA2B) and secondary colours used were shades of red (#FF6479) and blue (#029EF4). The font used in the app is “Mulish”. Once the colours, logo and the font was finalised, I began with the visual designs and finally the app was designed.

Visual Designs of the AirMeal App

Conclusion

Though I had a restricted time, as this case study was an assignment round for one of the interview process I was going through. I couldn’t follow the entire design thinking process and hence, divided my assignment round into four phases as I have described in this article.

Through this case study, I learned that the most important part is not only about the users but it is also about figuring out what the users want from using the app as correctly as possible. And this is not a simple task as sometimes users do not know what they want and do not find it easy to verbalise what they want.

Thank you for reading. :)