Example: Icelandair Interviews

Flew to Iceland to interview Icelandair Airline Stakeholders and Cabin Crew

Flew to Iceland to interview Icelandair Airline Stakeholders and Cabin Crew

I flew to Iceland to run in-person interviews with both the Icelandair Stakeholders and Cabin Crew. From the crew members, I wanted to learn about their basics needs, wants, areas of concern, pain points and motivations. I also wanted to gain additional behavioural data and insights by observing body language and listening for verbal cues. From the stakeholders, I wanted to get a clear understanding of their expectations, vision and core goals for the project. And gain context to help establish aligned milestones and prioritise tasks. 

Goals

  • To understand in a deeper context our users’ current goals, needs, behaviours, or expectations.

  • Identify areas of opportunity to enhance the user experience

  • To find out how we can bring the most value to them

  • Find out more about their workflow and environment

  • Learn about what drives them

  • Observe their personality traits during the interview to get a better picture of who our users are

Interviews

I sat down with a total of 5 Crew Members and 3 Stakeholders for a 45 mins interview each. The interviews took place in the Icelandair Main Office in Reykjavik, Iceland. The interview was audio recorded and contained both open ended and closed questions. After each interview there was a 15 mins debrief session to capture initial impressions and thoughts. The questions were built with the format below;

  • User background

  • The use of technology in general

  • The use of the product (overall workflow tasks)

  • The cabin crews main objectives and motivations

  • The cabin crews pain points

“It would be nice if the computers were working as fast as me”
— Icelandair Cabin Crew

Affinity Mapping

The interviews were extremely valuable and generated a large volume of user data. The Cabin Crew heavily rely on the app during their flights and are very much invested in being a part of redesign process. The findings were placed into an Affinity Map so it could be analysed and synthesised to find common patterns and themes.

Affinity Mapping Results: Creating actionable goals and metrics

Affinity Mapping Results: Creating actionable goals and metrics

Key Findings

  • Currencies - They would like an option to pick a default currency rather than showing Icelandic króna as their passengers generally want to know how much something is in euros

  • POS Interface - There is a large inventory of items displayed on the device rather than only the items connected to the flight. This seems to add time when loading and navigating through the items. Most of the crew find the search feature easier and quicker to use then navigating through the menu

  • Interaction - The crew rely heavily on product thumbnails when navigation through the inventory

  • Application Features - There was an overall opinion to reduce the features set rather than add new ones

  • User Feedback - If a payment fails they don't know if it is an issue with the card (black listed) or the device

Summary

The findings were prioritised through a team dot voting session. Each theme was turned into a defined pain point and given its own goals and metrics in which it could be measured. We could now clearly see the areas that our user valued the most and where we could make the biggest difference in the product.

Affinity Mapping w/ dot voting

Affinity Mapping w/ dot voting

Next Steps

Persona and Empathy Mapping Workshops

We used this new user data in our Persona and Empathy mapping workshops. With new key observations and quotes from the cabin crew we could create more validated assumptions when defining our maps.