Processes & Perspectives

I found the Analyze phase and the Ideate phases to be the most useful and really opened up the range of ideas and solutions our team could explore to solve our problem. The defining and selecting phase was a bit challenging because it’s really difficult for me to filter down ideas. I thought we came up with so many good and different ideas to solve our problem that we could have done several in parallel if we had the time and resources.  We might have had better results if we adjusted the length of each phase to allow for more time to focus on areas like implementation and evaluation. This might have allowed us to improve our solution by conducting more testing of our solution. This could have allowed our team to do more iterative design to strengthen our solution.  

Our group presents “Take Care.” our care package product for Air Travelers. For our rollout, we will partner with a national airline to provide travelers with “a grab bag” selection of items to improve their in-flight experience. Depending on the product selection, we will partner with local and national brands to feature a sample size of their product inside. The package design will be fun, bright and compact and travelers can reuse the resealable package.

To evaluate the performance of our group's implementation we could create a poll to see if our product is desirable by travelers and if we met our goal of creating a product that helps improve the travel experience. We could ask if our product sample selection is appropriate and if the type and size of the package we selected is appropriate. Travelers could vote on which package design and content collections work best. To assess the outcome of each phase I can use summative evaluation to “draw conclusions” about the phase based on the success of our final solution.

Our group's solution will be to create a line of care package products for Air Travelers. We will partner with United Airlines to allow passengers to purchase a care package when they book their flight and have them available when they arrive at their seat. Travelers will also have an opportunity to share their travel plans with friends and family who can also purchase a care package for them. To pitch this idea to stakeholders we plan on creating a rendering of the care pack and the selection of items we plan to offer. We will also create wireframes for the digital experience customers will interface with when selecting a package type and items for their trip. We will collect data from our survey and a/b testing to support our product and key partner selection.  

Selection: Air Travel Subscription Boxes

Selection: Air Travel Idea Seeking Questions

Our team selected “dining” as our focus area and did our last round of research and selection in this area. Within dining, we considered doing a food delivery service but we were concerned with logistics and security concerns. We leveraged the “Idea Potpourri” method/technique and came up with our final solution of creating subscription boxes/care packages for travelers by combining delivery and providing options not usually available in airport terminals. Subscription boxes allow us to work around some of the security concerns, have a greater reach to passengers, and bring delight to passengers by providing a curated collection of snacks and items to improve their travel experience.

​Our team was unsure what direction we wanted to go in coming out of our ideation phase. There were so many areas of interest within Air Travel we brainstormed ideas for. We did several rounds of deep dives into our areas of interest before selecting our final solution within our “Dining” category. Our group did several mind maps, researched each sub-category, and mashed up ideas to finally come up with our final solution of creating a subscription box for travelers. We think by providing this solution to travelers we will be able to help reduce air travel stress and anxiety and bring comfort back to the experience by providing a curated collection of food and products for their journey. 

During our working session, we had a conference call and worked collaboratively on coggle.it mind map to share and capture our ideas. We divided an hour into five-minute rapid brainstorming sessions where we shouted out and captured ideas for several of our questions. Our team came up with some unexpected and interesting ideas for better dining experiences and inflight enhancements that can make air travel less stressful and more comfortable. Some of our favorite ideas included food delivery, odorless meals, and expandable seating.

Group Brainstorming and Debriefing Session Process

Our group created a visual version of our morphological analysis to use as inspiration for our brainstorm session. We conducted our session remotely and leveraged google docs, sides, and coggle.it. During our brainstorm session, we used our problem definition to come up with our idea-generating questions. We selected one as our starting point and divided an hour into five-minute sessions where we generated ideas for each. We used coggle.it to capture our ideas by creating branches of questions and added ideas to them. Coggle allowed us to collaborate on a single diagram while we discussed our ideas over the phone.  We added icons to our diagram to start to identify overlap across branches and what type of resources we might need. Some of our favorite ideas included food delivery, odorless meals, and expandable seating.

Our team worked individually on defining our problem focusing on different pain points of the travel experience. Tsai focused on flight delays due to high winds, Sydney on the boarding process, and I focused on seating in the airport and inflight. We had a review session where we shared our individual definitions and identified overlap in our ideas. We were concerned that our ideas might have been jumping ahead to solutions so we took a step back to craft our definition “for the real problem.” We identified that our main goal was to improve the comfort and reduce the stress levels of air travelers, so we made that the focus of our final problem definition.  

The current experience of traveling by air has caused many travelers to be overwhelmed with anxiety and has made air travel annoying and dreadful. Travelers are forced to tolerate downgrades in service, long lines, delays, and discomfort in airports and on airplanes in exchange for low-cost travel. There is no investment by airlines in comfort or stress management for economy travelers.

 My white NASA coffee mug is one of my favorite mugs and I use it every morning. The size is great for making a single pour over cup of coffee and keeps my coffee warm. I once took it to work and lost it but a coworker found it in the kitchen a few months later and returned it to me.

Traveling by air has become an uncomfortable experience for travelers because of a lack of quality seating in airports and on airplanes. Redesigned airports have increased space for retail and dining options but in the process, they have reduced the number of seats available for passengers in terminals. Once passengers board their flights they are forced to sit hours in uncomfortable seats with reducing leg room. These changes raise travelers stress and anxiety levels.

Attribute Listing / Mind-Mapping Technique / Airline Travel