Card Sorting

To begin I created a card sort to see what information users saw as important on their passes. In this case the users I will initially focus on are ticket holders rather than airport employees. In our assignment there were some mandatory inclusions:

• Barcode or QR code

• Boarding gate number

• Boarding group number

• Boarding time

• Date and Departure time

• Destination and code

• Flight Number

• Last Name and First Name of passenger

• Origin and code Seat number

These were all turned into cards. After looking at existing boarding passes and considering my own information needs I added some cards of my own:

• Airplane model

• Airplane carrier name

• Cabin

• "Gate closes 15 mins prior to departure"

• Boarding pass label

• Airline use/Sequence number (sequence of check-in, for internal airline use)

• E-ticket number

• Ticket type (ie. economy, business, etc)

• Airport address

The goal of the boarding pass is to include all of this information but make what's important to the user be the most simple to parse at a glance.

Analysis

Here is a table of my final results:

I divided the results into 4 regions where the overall ranking was beginning to be quite similar. These regions will help to provide a hierarchy to the design. The research yielded 2 elements that were unanimously ranked as the most important details:

1. Boarding Gate Number

2. Boarding Time

Second in our hierarchy would be the details that almost evened out to second most important. This includes:

3. Boarding Group Number (Zone)

4. Departure Time

5. Departure Date

6. Seat Number

7. Name of Ticket Holder

8. Barcode/QR Code

9. Flight Number

The details that could be considered relevant but not very important to the user include:

10. Destination Airport

11. Cabin

12. Airport You're Departing from

13. Ticket Type (ie. economy, business, etc)

14. Boarding Pass Label

15. "Gate closes 15 mins prior to departure"

16. Airplane Carrier Name

And finally, the irrelevant details were:

17. Airplane Model

18. Airline Use/Sequence Number (sequence of check-in, for internal airline use)

19. E-ticket Number

20. Airport Address

Design

For the physical boarding pass, I created a completely black-and-white design to ensure high readability and low print costs. The different elements of the boarding pass are assigned different levels of importance through the use of font size and type. The elements that needed to be highlighted were decided based on the survey to ensure that the design of the boarding pass would cater to the users, specifically the passengers. All info needed by the airline employees (the secondary users) was grouped to the side as many survey responses found them to be the least important. After the rankings of all respondents were averaged, clear groups emerged in the data. These elements were assigned similar levels of importance that can be seen in the pass’s design.

Additionally, the labels are written in both English and French for increased accessibility. I also decided that the name on the boarding pass should be “first name” and then “last name” as this would decrease the words needed to be read/skipped over before the main differentiator is read, especially for passengers flying as families.