Technology, design and modern printing methods can be used to make the airline boarding pass so much more appealing to the eye and helpful for the brain.
Or at least that is what Tyler Thompson, creative director at New York-based agency SquareSpace, says after studying the functionality and design of the ubiquitous cards given to passengers after check-in at airports around the world.
Thompson took to his task after receiving a Delta pass on a recent trip from JFK to Seattle, Washington.
Here is the original pass:
The intrepid designer then examined each element of the pass, such as gate number, boarding time, seat information and flight number and turned the old design on its head – with amazing results.
The musings of a talented designer, a waste of time, or something airlines should consider?
NB: With thanks to Thompson for permission to reproduce his designs. Follow him on Twitter.
Looks much better but I have to ask does it really matter what the boarding pass looks like? I am sure that airlines and airport operators have better things to spend their money on.
Looks great, but would the airlines pass on the ink cost on to passengers? Looks like it would be expensive to print them
Lol, we’re moving in the other direction in Europe at least. Here’s my boarding pass from last week, which was not printed and only visible on my phone (and yes, I was somewhat doubtful it would work): http://sam-i-am.travellerspoint.com/141/
The only hickup was at the gate, where the phone first kicked up the ‘do you want to connect to this wifi’ message, then the guy supposed to do the scanning kept pressing buttons while trying to hold it under the scanner. In the end I did the scanning myself for all three of us travelling. Likewise at the initial security check.
If you work at the airport check boarding passes, you should be considering a new job, no doubt about it.
Hi, Sam
Thank you very much about tell me your experience, because I have a assignment about how to design a new airline ticket system. It is so helpful for me.
I would definitely go for the last one cause of my old eyes and the fact that I don’t want to waste color ink when I print my boarding pass here after checking in online…
Can’t get enough of the witty commentary on design in our industry from the likes of Dustin Curtis and Tyler Thompson featured here – it is refreshing to see someone challenge the status quo with a little humor and a lot of great design.
However, I think we are all too aware of the limitations here. $$$. Beyond that, thermal printers don’t allow for 2-color or large ink-block print designs very easily (as Tyler later mentions himself)… and again, more ink = more $$$. No matter how small, we all know how much every penny matters.
The other thing is, I can’t image any large airline choosing to print any variable associated with a flight in a larger font than what they do today – no matter how much it might improve the experience for the passenger. The only thing the airline can guarantee for sure is the seat and zone number, and that is what gets top-billing. Nothing else is even legible to someone over 60. Not time, gate, and sometimes even destination. Why would you put a constant reminder of exactly how late your plane is in 140 point font right in front of your already grumpy passengers? I can’t imagine that part of their design, while still atrocious, wasn’t intentional.
Lastly, and I don’t doubt you will try
, but I dare anyone to try to convince me that a traveler will choose another airline based on its boarding pass design… maybe this analogy is a stretch, but that’s like me buying a different brand of car because of the shape or color of the key.
Either way, thank God people like Tyler are pushing our industry to improve user experience in general. Even if this idea isn’t the one that will catch on, eventually one of them will… and that will be a good day.
Sarah: I don’t suppose any passenger (and I’d be worried if they did) would choose an airline based on the quality of their boarding passes.
However, for all the bleating many airlines do about their brand values and strength of image etc, they are failing by at least keeping things on-message throughout their materials.
Doesn’t need to more than two colours – just more helpful.
Darren/Josh – Good and informative changes to the design doesn’t need to be expensive or costly to the passenger.
Keeping to a two-tone colour set doesn’t increase printing costs.
@Kevin
Are you sure two-tone color wouldn’t increase printing costs? It looks like it would require more printer ink.
@josh
positive.
Sam: cards will indeed go this way, but for those that do not have fancy phones and prefer the, err, warm feel of a ticket in their hands, some improvements should be made, surely.
The boarding passes were sent via sms or email, so would work with any mobile theoretically (and you could always print it off email if you weren’t sure). I think there probably will be one staff member on standby, but certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Ryanair came along this year and said, “right, that’s enough, this is the deal from now on”. And if you want help from staff, there’ll be some pre-checked checkbox when purchasing your ticket adding 5 pounds to the price of your ticket
Sam:
“If you would like to receive a text boarding card, please SMS CARD to 12345. Texts cost Euro 4.99. We are only responsible if the text fails to arrives after the 14th attempt.”
I’m not sure what’s more interesting – the article or the commentary
I personally like them and surely there is a compromise where they can be printed at a reasonable cost.
From experience, probably the thing that needs the biggest point font is the ZONE (No, sir, I’m sorry you cannot board at this time, please wait until we call zone….).
I thought this was an interesting exercise, there’s some alternatives suggested by @timoni which consider some of the constraints others have mentioned:
http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-pass-redesign
Agreed though that while it is nice when a company has made the effort and the small things do add up to an overall experience with a brand, there’s likely to be little direct commercial advantage in airlines implementing such changes. For “end points” such as tours/activities or products/services used daily (mobile phones, hosted software applications etc) there can be some real value in such attention to detail.
Boarding passes aren’t used only by passengers — keep in mind that they are also used by airlines. A hundred thousand or more staff around the world (speakers of many languages natively written in many writing systems) are trained to recognize the data elements at a glance by standard positioning. There’s an elaborate and expensive installed infrastructure of printers and both optical and mag-stripe readers. Interline agreements make it invaluable for them to be standardized from airline to airline. And it’s essential to preserve backward compatibility with the old standards during any change (especially for the benefit of airlines without deep pockets to pay for a rapid change and the associated equipment.) The industry standards are set by IATA. Those of us old enough to remember the transition to the current ATB standard boarding pass format know how many years that took, with the so-called “transitional” formats remaining in use for about 20 years. Global technical standards and interoperability have huge benefits for travellers, weren’t easily achieved, and can’t easily be changed. Those who are treating this solely as a one-off graphic redesign job appear to be travellers unaware of the functional role of the boarding pass in the air travel business process.
Just give me a bar code or anything else for use on my smartphone rather than the flimsy paper the self-checking machines spew out today which unlike the thicker ones handed out by agents are impossible to keep from being all crunched up by the time you hand it over at the gate.
All great comments… good to see so much interest in user experience.
And just a little food for thought, Kevin, in response to your very valid points… many would agree that the best representation of one’s brand/image is based on the customer experience, but not necessarily the experience that comes from tangible items like a visually appealing boarding pass, but rather the intangible efficiency with which one can get past (sometimes) incompetent security personnel or gate agents, who on many days may only be capable of defaulting to the mindless process of staring at a boarding pass in the same place and swiping in with their pen in the same fashion, day-in and day-out.
The only thing these airlines can control to help that process along is to streamline boarding pass standards across all airlines, and differentiating your brand within that process could likely do more harm than help. But again, I understand your point about consistency in messaging, and it’s not just the boarding pass where many of these airlines are failing miserably at that – Dustin Curtis alerted us to that most recently w/ the AA site design issue.
But, let’s assume for a second that the changes above could potentially enhance visual appeal of the boarding pass and not slow down passengers. If so, do you think it is worth one penny more per boarding pass to do so? What about even half of a cent? I think it’s safe to say that there will be some cost involved in a change this wide-sweeping. There always is.
If we still agree that cost is worth it per pass, then based on air passenger projections for 2011 that are nearing 2.75B (IATA), at a penny increase in cost per printed pass (not taking into account those mobile boarding pass users), that improvement would cost the airline industry a mere $27.5M USD annually to make the changes proposed.
Any airlines out there with your portion of that in extra cash lying around that you could spare off of your bottom line, please raise your hand…? …but if you are too busy giving your unicorn a bath with fairy dust and Michael Jackson’s tears, just shoot us an email later.
Maybe something more useful would be a boarding pass you could actually use after you have got on the plane
ie. discount ticket for a tourist attraction, free airport transfer etc.
You get your card, they rip 90% of it off and your left with a stub so really, there’s not point having a flashy looking boarding pass.
Maybe airlines could fund the extra printing costs by putting advertising/coupons on the back — my supermarket does it
Interesting designs, but I could not spot a couple of things, probably because they were not on the original boarding pass:
1) Special code on pass to indicate the pax is subject to ‘extra security’ – is this ‘SSSSS’?
2) Frequent Flyer Number and Tier level
These items may appear more on international boarding passes than US domestic.
Also there is no such thing as a standard layout these days – web checking boarding passes look completely different. I can see the confusion on the flight attendant’s face when they check that I’m on the right plane when I board as they try to find the elements they are looking for in ‘non standard’ places!
Finally, one annoying item that is NOT on the boarding pass – it would be useful to have the scheduled flight arrival time – often I cannot remember and the itinerary has been filed away in my bag – but I have to phone for a taxi at the other end to meet my flight and invariably they want to know the scheduled arrival time.