The Opportunity

With some major airlines such as American Airlines and Alaska Airlines phasing out seatback entertainment screens across their fleets, United Airlines made a bold bet on the future of inflight entertainment in their partnership with Panasonic Avionics to install their latest Astrova solution to select Boeing 787 and Airbus A321XLR aircraft.

In addition to greatly enhanced technical specs such as 4K OLED screens and bluetooth functionality, these devices will also allow for much greater internet connectivity, faster software updates, and insight driven personalization opportunities. These advancements set the stage for a more innovative omnichannel customer-centric experience, which is the crux of this project.

01 Discovery & Definition

Balancing cybersecurity and the customer experience

Summary

United Airlines takes cybersecurity and customer data very seriously, and while personalization offers a stronger customer experience, verification of customer identity and where that is stored was a very important thing to solve for early on. To account for this, our team opted to move forward with a standalone United seatback application that lives within Panasonics native device that would feel cohesive to the overall experience. Within that "United seatback app", we could pull data such as manifest details and MileagePlus account information once a customer has been "verified", and even incorporate existing United mobile app features.

Early on in the project we focused on establishing some design system guidelines and components that would be utilized within the Android seatback app, accounting for the larger screen sizes. This has continued to evolve since as new use cases and visual direction is solidified. For the initial rollout, the project scope would entail customer verification, seamless QR code integration with personal devices, seat upgrade promotions, and the ability to continue from recent flight searches.

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02 Ideate & Design

UX/UI Design

Summary

On the seatback devices, customers have a "welcome journey" that allows them to set their language settings, view details about inflight service, and more. This felt like the most natural place to introduce customer verification as well, which would involve matching date of birth information provided via the manifest to the seat number. Our research suggested that while inputting this information on the device may be more intuitive, not every customer would feel comfortable doing so on what is essentially a shared public device. As such, we gave users the ability to scan a QR code as well, which would prompt a similar input scenario, or bypass it altogether for signed in MileagePlus users like the scenario below.

Alternate flows and error states

While the QR code handoff option is simple in theory, we needed to account for all potential scenarios and device types.

Personalized features and special offers

Once a customer has been verified, personalization opportunities are unlocked. For the initial rollout, there are a handful of smaller features that we identified such as inflight notifications and special promotional offers. These include award miles for MileagePlus sign up, special offers on seat upgrades for return or connecting flights, and highlighting offers on recent searches. For some of these features, we will be leveraging a QR code handoff which will drive the customer to our web or app experience to complete transactions but will look to have an option to incorporate this into the seatback device as well in the future.

03 Development & Next Steps

Evolving the experience

Summary

Development for the seatback experience is a lengthier process than our mApp and dotCom channels at the moment, however as our onboard technology continues to improve we anticipate that releases can happen more frequently and with shorter turnaround time. In addition to providing high-fidelity designs and flow documentation, I also provided additional development support for things like focus states for components, and guidelines for how to scale dimensions for a variety of seatback screen sizes.

As we start to see customers interact with the experience, we look forward to using the learnings to shape the design for enhancements we are planning for future releases.

Top 5 Things I Learned

1. Start small to test assumptions at scale: While we had much larger, more ambitious personalized features in scope early on, it was important for us to test assumptions on how likely customers would be to verify and scan QR codes to inform subsequent releases.
2. Omnichannel design thinking: When designing for experiences involving multiple screens, it is important to consider expectations and system status across both.
3. Minimilaist design: We intentionally kept designs minimal in nature, and error state scenarios ended up accounting for the majority of what was delivered as the happy path was intended to be very seamless.
4. Focus on focus states: While our seatback designs were limited for this exercise, it was important for us to consider how the experience would behave in focus state scenarios for customers using a remote control.
5. Scaling designs: To account for a variety of seatback device sizes and resolutions, we needed to partner closely with our Android developers to identify a delivery model and rules that would scale effectively.

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