Air New Zealand

Usability testing of the skycouch

About the client

Air New Zealand is our national airline and operates scheduled passenger flights to destinations in 15 countries across Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. Widely regarded for the quality of their service, in 2010 Air New Zealand was awarded Airline of the Year by the Air Transport Global Airline Awards.

The scenario

In January 2010, Air New Zealand released details of its new long haul travel product. Although most of the focus has been on its new Economy Skycouch™ seating, this actually only represents one piece of a very large puzzle in offering a new long haul experience that Air New Zealand hopes will put it at least two years ahead of its competition.

In mid 2007 global design innovators IDEO were selected by Air New Zealand to help them develop a new long haul experience strategy (check out http://www.futuretakingflight.com/). The insights from the IDEO work lay the foundation for the next stage of conceptual seat design in which Kiwi design companies helped create 19 separate concepts. The Air New Zealand team managed to whittle these 19 concepts down to five that it thought offered the most promise. It was at this stage in February 2008 that Air New Zealand approached Optimal Usability to help test the concepts to identify which one or two to actually build and place on its new long haul aircraft. The brief was simple: “we know you’ve never done anything like this before, but we back you guys to help us understand how customers will react.”

“The guys at Optimal Usability are a great team! Air New Zealand has set some very daunting challenges which have been met with enthusiasm and a passion for representing the customer experience that we really respect and value”

Hudson Smales, Head of Design House – Air New Zealand

Developing personas

Optimal Usability worked with Air New Zealand to establish personas that communicated how key market demographics behaved when travelling and what was important to them. This helped focus a diverse group of designers to a single view of the key customer groups.

Creating realistic test flights

Utilising a mock Boeing 787 cabin that Air New Zealand had built in a secret location in Auckland (the first outside of Boeing’s facility in Seattle), Optimal Usability worked on creating a realistic shortened flight experience. The realism factor was critical in drawing out true customer behaviours throughout a flight experience. Some key contributors to the realism were:

• Actual aircraft sound
• Lighting that mimicked a real flight
• Real cabin crew to provide safety instructions and service
• Adequate lengths of time for sleep to understand real behaviours
• Adequate number of passengers in a test flight to encourage real social behaviours
• Actors who brought a level of realism to their own flight experience and helped other passengers get into a role-playing frame of mind.

Flight Experience (FX) Testing

Optimal Usability co-ordinated groups of passengers from each target demographic through flight sessions and observed the interactions of passengers with all aspects of the design concepts i.e. seats, tray table, in-flight entertainment, access in and out of rows, service options, etc.
 
Observations and photographs focused on parts of the experience that worked well and aspects that caused issues. Following the FX test session, Optimal Usability facilitated focus groups with the passengers and designers to better understand what was observed and to discuss what design changes should be made.
 
Working closely with the designers, quick design iterations were made and then re-tested with the next group of passengers. This style of iterative design helped converge the design efficiently, based on real passenger feedback.

Using actors and real customers

Initial seat concepts in the mock aircraft environment were made of polystyrene and the overall environment required some imagination to provide useful feedback. Optimal Usability recruited method actors who were able to take on the role of the personas. The ability for the actors to play the persona characters and then articulate the experience was a very successful technique for the early prototypes.
As the fidelity and realism of the seat concepts were developed, real customers were recruited to participate in the FX test sessions.

Designs that really work for customers

Working with Air New Zealand and their partners in a collaborative environment allowed rapid iterative designs to be tested and refined. With most of the design team being part of FX testing sessions, there was a shared understanding of the issues to be solved and hence focused solutions.
 
Building on the work we did with the seat concepts and FX testing, we also got the opportunity to:

• facilitate conceptual design workshops and user test the new in-flight entertainment system
• test the conceptual design for the online booking experience for the new long haul experience.

We admire Air New Zealand’s “anything is possible” approach to innovation whilst balancing that with the belief that customer-centred design would realise the full potential of that innovation.

Outcomes

• Enabled Air New Zealand to assess physical seat prototypes with customers
• Enabled Air New Zealand to assess new service concepts with real customers
• Enabled Air New Zealand to refine seat concepts using feeback from customers to create a world leading product that works well for customers