Lobby Innovation
Evaluate United’s airport hub lobbies for pain points (spoiler: a confusing bag drop system and poorly designed check-in kiosks presented the two biggest inefficiencies)
Propose digital and/or infrastructural solutions to improve the airport lobby experience and reduce wait times during peak hours
As product strategist on the project, my responsibilities included the following:
Executed airport lobby observations, identifying pain points in current experience
Worked with Apple Design Lab team and United stakeholders to design strategic vision for initial POC at San Francisco International Airport
Designed initial concepts for shared agent/customer tablet special assistance workstation
Collaborated with UX researcher, Apple Design Lab team to design new bag drop process and initial prototype for bag drop tablet
Communicated proposal to leadership of United’s digital products organization
A record number of people traveled United in 2019, which put stress on lobby infrastructure and compromised the company’s ability to provide great customer service. Peak travel times meant long lines and overworked agents. Company leadership realized something needed to change, and in 2020, the business planned to reinvest $300 million of its revenue to improve the customer experience. Innovating airport hub lobbies was a top priority.
To answer that question, I kicked off my involvement in the lobby innovation project by conducting airport observations and informal interviews with lobby management, including overburdened agents, at O’Hare.
Here's what I observed:
Highly congested passenger drop-off areas
Most travelers were dropped off at the first entrance to the terminal, even though it wasn’t always the most convenient for their itinerary.
Confusing or insufficient signs for directing travelers
A lack of consumer knowledge about the check-in process
A poorly choreographed bag-drop process
Although my team and I found quite a few sources of stress in United’s airport lobbies, we homed in on the bag-drop process. The existing model asks all customers who are checking bags to wait in line twice—first to use a check-in kiosk to print a bag tag, and second to drop off their bags with an agent.
My team and I gained more insights from focused airport observations.
Customers have no incentive to prepay for their bags or check-in prior to arriving at the airport. Any traveler who is checking a bag must complete the two-step process, which involves visiting a check-in kiosk, even if they’ve already checked in online.
Customers don’t want to wait twice. Period.
Customers have a hard enough time predicting the wait time for one line, let alone two. This makes it especially difficult to know what time to arrive at the airport.
It’s uncomfortable to move between the kiosk line and the bag-drop line. I saw people drop passports, boarding passes, and earbuds; others juggled receipts, boarding passes, and bag tag stickers. Sometimes people even held these documents in their mouths.
A two-step bag-drop process isn’t intuitive for travelers. Some assume that because they’ve prepaid for their bags, they can go straight to the second line. There is no written explanation of the process when one checks in on the web or with the app. There’s no airport signage either.
Customers aren’t required to weigh their bags before they receive a bag tag, meaning that some customers wait in both lines only to realize at the last second that they have overweight bags. If this happens, they have two options:
Repack (sometimes they do this right there, in the bag-drop line, holding it up for others)
Return to the kiosk line to pay for an overweight bag—bag-drop employees cannot process payments.
In fact, contracted bag-drop employees are only allowed to perform a few tasks for the customer: scanning bag tags, weighing bags, and checking IDs. Customers are frustrated when a bag-drop employee cannot even help them at a kiosk.
Occasionally, customers mistakenly wait in the bag-drop line for help with rebookings, document verification, etc.
To put it lightly, the two-step bag-drop process is a major inefficiency.
United’s lobby innovation project involved a partnership with Apple’s Design Team, and so I traveled to Cupertino with a group of stakeholders for a week-long workshop. In their lab, we conducted informal interviews with customers, which helped us envision a two-part solution to United’s bag-drop problems.
We envisioned an express, single-step bag drop for customers who had checked-in and prepaid for their checked bags prior to arriving at the airport (with United.com or the app). In this system, these eligible travel-ready customers could go directly to a bag drop, where an agent would weigh their bag, tag it, and put it on the conveyer belt.
Express bag drop met many of our goals:
Create efficiencies and streamline the airport lobby experience
Eliminate a step in the bag-drop process by sending customers to a single line
Deflect tagging to agents instead of requiring customers to put the stickers on their bags themselves
Incentivize off-airport check-in and bag prepay, thereby reducing wait times
Our vision for express bag drop rendered the lobby kiosk unnecessary for many customers. In fact, anyone who checked in to their flight on the app or website wouldn’t need to use them at all. So, who would?
We reimagined the lobby kiosks as shared agent/customer workstations targeted at customers who needed additional services. The previous two-step bag-drop process had used an “agent overrides” screen to signal to a customer needing extra services that an agent would meet them at the kiosk to direct them to an additional services counter. In our vision, those customers would be able to solve their problems right then and there instead of being redirected to yet another line.
We were planning for implementation when the 2020 coronavirus disease was declared a public health emergency of international concern. A global sense of anxiety and international travel restrictions meant that most nonessential travelers stayed home. Long lines in United’s airport lobbies were no longer the main issue (or an issue at all). We put the implementation of a new bag-drop on indefinite.
The company’s new priority was customer and employee safety, and it was all hands on deck. How could we make all of United’s shared spaces safer?
Because my team and I had just completed thorough observations of the workings of United’s airport lobbies, we could repurpose our insights in service of our new goal. In fact, just two weeks after stay-at-home orders began, I had an idea: a touchless check-in kiosk for our lobbies.