United Airlines | 2019 - 2020
Restrategize the functionality of the self-service kiosks located at United’s airport gates to increase their value to customers.
As product strategist on the project, my responsibilities included the following:
Collaborated with the UX research lead to execute research study leading to a digital strategy for self-service gate kiosks
Built and managed relationships across United’s innovation and airport strategy teams that manage gate innovation initiatives
Collaborated with the Director of Digital Products and technology leadership to plan release cadence as part of a POC at O’Hare International Airport
Communicated design and product strategy to business stakeholders and the digital product organization leadership
In 2019, a business group at United undertook a “Gate Innovation” project. For their first POC in the Cleveland airport, the team threw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what would stick. They changed seating configurations, added outlets, moved agent podiums, installed new digital displays, and even put up some quirky decorations. They also installed self-service kiosks at the gate. But throughout the months-long POC, the ten new kiosks generated an average total of just six transactions per day. My team was brought in to clean up.
From my perspective, it was clear that the team responsible for the changes had been preoccupied with customer perception of the brand. They wanted United to seem sleek and edgy but hadn’t thought about how the new kiosks could actually provide value to the customer or the business. They had essentially invested significant resources into jerry-rigging United’s mobile app for the 22-inch kiosk touchscreens. Not only did this make them profoundly difficult to use, but there was no strategy involved. For example, customers who were already at their gates would not still need to use the app’s check-in feature.
Kicking off our work, my team and I needed to figure out why there was such low engagement with the kiosks, what functionalities could actually provide value to customers, and how the kiosks could fit into existing gate processes. We needed to come up with a plan that could be implemented in an expansion of testing at O’Hare Airport and, ultimately, in all of United’s airport hubs.
We undertook extensive initial discovery activities.
Airport observations in Cleveland, which allowed us to interview agents and watch flights board, helped us understand exactly what had been implemented.
Stakeholder interviews clarified the goals and timelines of the project.
An expert review of the existing kiosk UX provided insight into what had been done well and what needed improvement.
A kiosk seek and find gave me the opportunity to observe and document secondary competitive kiosk implementations throughout Chicago. While kiosks play a pivotal role in airport operations, their strategy hasn’t been reconsidered since the integration of self-bag tag kiosks almost a decade ago. This left me with questions about how they work in today’s landscape.
What value do they provide to customers and businesses?
How are kiosks placed in physical space?
What role does physical signage play?
How do customer service agents interact in relation to kiosks?
What type of devices are being used?
What are trends in UI patterns, navigation, visual design?
During our observations at the airport, we saw customers ask agents for help with menial tasks, like looking up their place on the standby list or their flight status, adding their frequent flyer number to their reservations, changing seats, and even finding out what time it was. We wondered if the self-service kiosk could be used to offload this work so that agents could perform their primary responsibilities more efficiently.
We investigated why the kiosks weren’t effectively helping already.
The homepage gave no indication of how the kiosk could help customers.
Pull all functionalities to the forefront of the experience by listing them on the homepage.
Most customers would be looking to complete a single task.
Get rid of the architecture of the check-in flow because it didn’t match the gate environment.
Customers had to input their confirmation numbers to look up their flight information. These numbers are not always easy to find.
Make sure the kiosks have the capability to scan boarding passes to retrieve reservation information since all customers will have boarding passes at this point in their journey.
Prototype A illustrated a flow in which a customer wanted to accomplish a few tasks: check their flight’s status on the second leg of their trip, add their frequent flyer number, and track their checked bags.
Testing: In the airport, we did ten-minute guerilla interviews with fifteen travelers as they walked through Prototype A.
Findings: While Prototype A provided a more user-friendly experience than the existing kiosks, we found that it would provide minimal value to the customer. Having a kiosk at the gate would neither disrupt airport processes, nor aid them.
Prototype B was a dummy application we hooked up to Google Analytics. Its homescreen listed all potential functionalities, but tapping on any one option would only provide messaging that we were still building out the kiosk and give directions for accomplishing the selected task.
Testing: We uploaded Prototype B to the kiosk device and left it in a high-traffic gate area for a day.
Findings: We only captured six customer-triggered interactions over the course of the entire day. We noticed that much of the functionality could already be found on the mobile app. Customers who didn’t have the app, on the other hand, mentioned that their first instinct in the event they needed help would be to talk to a gate agent, not walk up to a kiosk.
During the kiosk seek and find, we identified the most successful kiosk strategies to be the ones with a clear purpose. The prototypes we built still didn’t have a clear purpose.
As we brainstormed, we kept coming back to one central question: Most people felt ready for boarding by the time they arrived at their gates; why would they need to make any changes at this point?
Then it hit us: Customers need to rebook missed, delayed, and canceled flights.
The potential value of a gate kiosk really centered on its ability to provide self-service rebooking when flights are delayed and canceled. We believed this kiosk strategy could streamline a process that currently results in long lines at most airports. In the existing system, gate agents do not process rebookings; instead, they refer customers to the call center or the onsite customer service desk. At O’Hare, for travelers flying out of gates B19-B24, the walk to the service desk can take 10-15 minutes, and there can sometimes be as many as 200 people in line.
But what if gate agents could instead refer customers to a rebooking kiosk in the immediate environment? Looking to the future, we also thought that if a customer was unable to rebook with the kiosk, they could use it to enter a virtual queue to see an agent at the customer service desk or by phone.
We easily rallied the support we needed for our strategy to move forward, and we’d implement it in a formal POC at O’Hare. So, we needed to figure out the fastest and most sustainable way of building our new kiosks. We met with our technology partners and decided that building a new frontend on top of the existing mobile app would require a minimal, low-risk investment.
I worked with a Director of Digital Products to plan a timely first release as part of the 2020 “Gate Innovation” POC at O’Hare. We roadmapped subsequent releases that would evolve the mobile app into the fully formed rebooking kiosk.
We launched our MVP in late March 2020 and released a second iteration in early May 2020.
While the project has been put on hold because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the travel industry, we have identified our future metrics of success for the POC:
Is usage of our gate kiosks higher than usage of legacy kiosks at the customer service center?
Is the completion rate of rebookings higher than that of the legacy kiosks?
Something about the homescreen and how it aimed to use animation and art work to draw attention to the kiosk and communicate what could be accomplished at the kiosk.
