Paris Aeroport is the second largest airport group in terms of revenue and the first in terms of airmail and freight handling, with around 200 airline companies hosted on its platforms - the main ones being Paris-Orly and Paris-Charles de Gaulle. The company is always looking to improve its services for travelers and airlines. In 2013, Aéroports de Paris has welcomed 90.3 million passengers.

CHALLENGE

Orientating inside ever-growing airports as well as users journey are two major focus of their customer-centered reflection. This is why Paris Aeroport wanted to design, test and produce in a short time the Proof of Concept (POC) of a new service, offering in-bound passengers guidance upon their arrival at the airport terminal to their final destination. This orientation device would display various itineraries and alternative transportation means to reach their final destination.

METHODOLOGY AND OUTPUTS

Our agile and iterative methodology was based on the following principles:

• Producing and releasing a first version (MVP) as early as possible
• Gathering analytics to have reliable insights
• Improving the initial system with added-value services based on our observations

We initiated the project with an in situ research and observation phase of the passengers’ behavior. It allowed us to understand if and how travelers anticipated their route out of the airport, found their way, and chose the transportation means to reach their final destination. This phase was synthesized by the production of personas and experience cards, upon which we based the design and production of a first prototype, functioning on the iPad. We then ran around 60 in situ tests of this first prototype during two months to validate and fine-tune the first hypothesis.

The next iteration was deployed on three interactive orientation devices at the Arrival terminal in Orly to collect specific data on the device in real conditions of use. We also did another round of in situ observations, to clearly identify the possible remaining blocking points for the users.

Our technical team used external services for routes calculations for public transports; they are based on the Vianavigo service, thanks to Paris Aeroport partnership with the STIF (Syndicat des Transports d’IDF). On the coding aspect of the project, our focus was on the high-performance level of a very light application in order to ensure 24/7 usage without having any performance drop.

RESULTS

The user satisfaction survey realized by an independent research institute showed the project has been a real success, despite a challenging context (complex public transports network, stressed and tired users…). The experimentation period confirmed the systems’ added value and validated the idea of deploying it to all the airports terminals.

The kiosk has since received the 2015 “Observeur du Design” label.