The Aircruiser project – Why are the passengers boarding through the kitchen entrance?

Airbus gave us the freedom to come up with new and innovative ideas of how future long-haul passenger aircrafts should be designed. We came up with a spectacular concept, the world's biggest passenger plane with two floors, consisting of restaurants, cafes, playroom, gym, and several other meeting places for the passengers. However, the project didn´t start with creating wild ideas.

Our first impression of the aircraft industry was that of an industry mainly focusing on technology, engineering and production. The needs and experiences of the end users, in this case the passengers were not on the top of their priority list. The industry was characterised by a severe lack of user driven innovation. Passengers on the other hand, could hardly differentiate between the airlines. For the user they all looked the same, focusing on ticket price and travel time.

Before we started the idea stage, we chose to emphasis on activities that led to a better user insight. We wanted to understand the customers experience, and what they felt were of importance to them during the whole journey from embarking to disembarking the plane. We believed that the economy class had a great potential for improvements, and that this would appeal to a large and important customer group that the airline industry had undervalued over decades.

By interviewing passengers, and through observations made ​​by people who are not involved with the daily operations of the airline industry, we received lots of new and useful user insights.

We found that airlines actually are boarding their customers through the kitchen entrance. The first impression that meet the passengers when they enter the plane are exposed safety installations such as oxygen equipment, defibrillators, fire extinguishers, and other very technically designed emergency equipment. The next thing that appears is something that reminds you of a military field kitchen. All these very pragmatic devices are exposed to the passenger in that very moment when the expectations of an enjoyable and pleasant journey should be created.

The economy class passengers gave us a lot of useful and interesting information about cramped economy class seats, or toilets that are more adapted to the fuselage than the people they are meant to be designed for. The seats probably represent 60-70% of the passengers experience on long-haul flights. Aircraft manufacturers’ don´t manufacture seats. They only advise their customers, the airlines, to choose seat suppliers based on delivery time, finance and warranties. It is a paradox that what the passengers feel is of great importance to them, is neglected by the aircraft industry. There were hundreds of other issues, related to the passenger experience, which were explored by the design team.

Offering attractive solutions for the passengers is the best approach to avoid meeting the competition on low price only.

What did the user driven design project mean for our client? The project was strongly supported by the top management and contributed to an increased consciousness about the user experience. Full-scale models were made to test ergonomics and new user-friendly solutions for implementation in future aircraft at Airbus. We think that Airbus has evolved from being a very technically focused company, to become a more user driven organisation.

The next step to win the passengers favours needs to be run by the airlines. It would be a good start for them to develop a better understanding of their customers experience and needs through a user driven innovation process. User driven innovation is a very cost effective route in creating new solutions that attract the customers.

If you like to know more about how the user driven innovation process can help your organisation, please contact us here.