SKY Space: Beyond Seats, Building Experiences

Project brief

Imagine you're sitting on a plane, watching people come down the aisle. You know what you're thinking: "Please, please don't let that person sit next to me."

Sky Space is an application designed for use before and during flights. It assists users in reserving the most suitable flight seat based on their personal characteristics and needs.

Design goal

The design aims to enhance the in-flight experience by facilitating exciting in-person interactions between passengers and identifying users' needs through user research.

Design process

"l'enfer, c'est les autres" (hell is other people)
— jean paul sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his novel 'No Exit,' and this quote has been hailed as a slogan for introverts. It's a fitting way to articulate any sort of discontent or dissatisfaction we encounter with strangers on public transport and with our time-stealing coworkers." (Credits: [link])

"I usually get so afraid while finding my seat on a flight. Checking who will be sitting next to me, I wonder, 'What if he or she is a real psychopath?'" - P3

"It's just so awkward to spend my entire flight time right next to strangers." - P7

"Sometimes I dread the uncertainty of who my seatmate might be." - P10

This project was inspired by my passion for travel and my observations of people's behaviors on flights. People travel abroad for various reasons, and their flight experiences are often unique, whether it's for visiting family, business trips, exploring new places, studying abroad, or just traveling.

However, the current flight seat reservation system offers limited information when passengers reserve seats. Most passengers choose their seats based on preferences like window or aisle and back or front. The identity of your seatmate on that flight from London to Singapore might remain a total mystery—until they sit next to you.

Through this project, I sought to explore how I can help people have a more memorable experience during flights with other passengers and enjoy socializing moments more effectively. This specifically focuses on the seat reservation step that requires extensive personal data

3 Design Scenarios

Through these three design scenarios, I aimed to explore various solutions to this problem:

  1. Each seat is assigned a color that represents the passenger's preferences. The airline displays these colors for each seat on the booking page, with similar colors indicating like-minded passengers.

  2. Pre-written information about passengers, such as their Facebook profile or flight preference settings, appears on the reservation page.

  3. A mobile app recommends seats based on each passenger's data, collected through a survey, prior to booking.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping

With this low-fidelity prototyping, I aimed to evaluate the overall user flow and determine whether the information needed at each stage is clearly presented.

  • Onboarding: Users can select specific airplane information by entering departure, destination, and airline details without the need to log in or connect to a separate account.

  • Take Survey: Users complete a survey to provide their preferences.

  • Sky DNA: Sky Space displays the results of your Sky DNA based on the survey.

  • Recommendations: The system provides seat recommendations and the likelihood of compatibility with your potential seatmate.

  • Additional Information: Users can access additional details, including which seats are already booked, the location of seats reserved by passengers with infants, and reviews of flight seats.

Experience Prototyping

Following the initial prototyping phase, Adobe XD was utilized to swiftly develop a simplified secondary design. The user study was conducted subsequent to this secondary design phase. Through testing, I identified the aspects that required further refinement.

Changes made:

  • Provided clearer headings for each point for better organization.

  • Clarified the description of the onboarding process.

  • Specified the change in the registration box's position and size.

  • Clarified the modifications made to the survey steps and the recommendation UI.

  • Replaced 'Backward' with 'Back' for the button description, as it is a more common term in user interfaces.

1. Easy integration with airline accounts.

2. Interactive characteristic analysis through three rounds of questions.

3. Description of passenger types and recommendations for the best seats. Different passenger types identified from the survey include: Galaxy Hitchhiker, Interstellar, Mars, etc.