Preface: I'm a loyal Delta customer.
This morning I waited for a flight inside a Delta lounge at Salt Lake City's airport. They offer free WIFI and once you agree to the terms and conditions they redirect you to the Delta Sky Club portal, a mostly useless page featuring not much more than weather from a city that's neither my current location or destination, ads probably injected by the vendor that maintains this portal for Delta, and a few airline and news headlines that are completely irrelevant to my travel. We're all familiar with these pages -- you usually run into them anytime you use complimentary internet at hotels and airports, and they're total junk.
What a missed opportunity to improve their customers' experience.
So, I decided to join the rank of designers who offer unsolicited advice to airlines (Most notably Dustin Curtis' letter to American Airlines) and gave myself an hour's time-limit to rethink this Delta page, with their current look and feel as a constant, in order to demonstrate a fairly simple page that is dramatically more valuable.
You might ask how an airline is supposed to know who is who so that they can show each passenger's private data. My idea is to require your frequent flyer mile number in order to access free WIFI (almost everyone in a lounge has a number) and perhaps even use my Delta.com cookie to autofill it. If a passenger doesn't have a number, give them an opt-out and take them to the old portal for now.
If I had another hour, I'd clean up the grid, add more details and history about the airplane you'll be riding (dataporn), emphasize actions (like "Change your seat") in a more distinct way, and add a row of icons to summarize the perks of your flight (WIFI, Food, TV, Business Class, etc).
Update: Would like to show weather advisories, design state for delayed flight.
James Nord, davidwrad, Mark Otto, @superamit, and 99 other people added this photo to their favorites.
tarikh 34 months ago
Love it.
pixietart 34 months ago
brilliant.
jeffreyk 34 months ago
Nice work, sir.
Paul Mayne 34 months ago
Awesome idea Zach. Arrival city weather / temperature would also be useful info.
With large corporations like Delta, things like this seem so useful and obvious from the outside it's hard to imagine why it's not happening. From the inside it's typically so full of bureaucracy and politics it's had to get anything useful and innovative done unless mandated from the top on down with proof on how it's going to improve the bottom-line.
timgeisenheimer 34 months ago
This is awesome. Quick tangential question: could you explain the conventions for your Safari bookmark bar bookmarks?
Zach Klein 34 months ago
@Paul Mayne: Being a big company is no longer a sufficient excuse for not doing things right online. I know it's hard for them to maneuver, but it's do or die.
As for weather, I intentionally left it out. I think time and temp are both misused by portals. I assume that most people already have a primary method for checking the weather and that this page didn't need to include it in order to be useful to a passenger.
kallifornia 34 months ago
that looks great, such an improvement. But I'm sure they'd insist on keeping ads at the top of the page, because airlines are like vampires for money, charging for every little thing. It might work out if they could incorporate an ad by Chick-Fil-A, or whatever relevant food/store is near that gate that you'd mentioning anyway.
Zach Klein 34 months ago
Adding ads wouldn't be a problem, but I suspect most of the ads here are managed by the third-party vendor that offers this 'Portal' as an off-the-shelf product to Delta. Delta doesn't need that third-party or those ads.
Mark Ellison 34 months ago
Good point re: weather!
Jace Cooke 34 months ago
Ads should be immediately actionable (e.g. free drink coupon at Chick-fil-a.)
I'd also like to be told the approximate amount of time it will take to walk/shuttle from the lounge to my gate.
Agreed that weather is overused, but something specific like: "it's 15 degrees colder than average today in NYC, you might want to keep a jacket in your carry-on" would still be appreciated.
feldmania 34 months ago
Instructions (cost, location in terminal with map) on ground transportation options in the arrival city would be a nice feature. Could monetize referrals to a preferred car service partner, SuperShuttle, etc.
Weather could be below the fold - agree that most may have another way to get weather, but in this context weather as it affects ground delays on the departure and arrival airport would be a nice feature. And updates on airport-wide ground delays due to weather or congested air-traffic.
Zach Klein 34 months ago
Good thoughts Jace and Feldman. It would be fun to design 'Delayed' states of this page.
Jace Cooke 34 months ago
The "delayed" states should offer increasingly appeasing consolations. 30 minutes? Discounted wi-fi on flight. 3 hours? All you can eat Cinnabon.