Master My Flight:Improving Sleep Experience for Passengers in Long-Haul Flight via Mobile-Based Application and In-Flight Entertainment System

Abstract

This master graduation project explores the possibilities for enhancing passenger’s in-flight sleep experience during different stages in an economic class in a long-haul flight. The main purpose of this project is to get deeper understanding of sleep in cabin from passenger’s perspective, and try to use interactive design help them throughout the flight journey. This thesis project consists of five phases, context exploration, research, project redefinition, conceptualisation and verification. Most research activities were executed in the first two phases. During the context exploration phase, the goal is to gain basic knowledge and comprehensive information in aviation field, including the market trend, the stakeholders, and the contextual constraints. Therefore, the scope is relatively broad and literature research is the main method.
After that, the research scope was gradually narrowed down based on the findings from the previous research, and the focus now is on long-haul flight passengers and sleep in various environment. Through desk research, several theory models were analysed. In order to gather opinion from different types of passengers, several user-centred methods were also used, like co-creation, online survey, field research. The insights from this phase benefit the next phases as solid evidence. Combining insights gathered from these research activities, a concrete project definition was obtained. The design goal is “to make passengers who want to have a nice sleep feel more in control during different phases in long-haul flights”. An interaction vision was also defined as “being in control”. Additionally, the specific requirements were listed as the evaluation criteria of concepts. In conceptualization stage, several rounds of ideation were performed to generate initial concepts. According to the requirements and the difficulty of the implement, one concept was chosen for further development. Then a low-fidelity wireframe was used to fast-iterate the concepts by walkthrough. The final concept was then concluded in the final phase of verification. The digitally interactive prototype was built for evaluation of the effectiveness and usability. The evaluation results were analysed to see whether the final design meets the design goal and how participants experience the design. Due to the restriction of the social distance policy, most offline activities were prohibited, more than half of the evaluation tests were done via internet. The future recommendation has also been proposed in the last stage. The design of phone application could be the starting point for the future development of the digital platform, connecting different journey phases for passengers. And the improvement on in-flight entertainment system might also be applied in the near future.