A Smart Watch Design for Collaboration Amongst Flight Attendants

Smart Crew is a smart watch application that allows flight attendants to maintain an awareness of each other and communicate through messaging with haptic feedback. It is designed with an emphasis on real time information access and direct communication between flight attendants regardless of their location on their airplane. It is designed for a Samsung Gear S2 smart watch. I came up with the initial ideas and scenarios, created the flows and wireframes, and finally designed a high-fidelity mock-up for the developers to work on. My role included:

• User Research
• Interaction Design: Ideation, Wireframe, Adobe XD Prototype
• Visual Design Guideline
• Hi-fi Mockup with Adobe XD

User Research

I conducted a semi-structured interview with eleven flight attendants from national  and international. The interview was for 45 to 90 minutes, over Skype. Data was collected in the form of researcher's notes and audio-recording of all interviews. I used the 'Critical Incident Method' and asked users to narrate a range of stories with the goal of understanding their work practices, from the moment they boarded the plane to the point at which it landed and all passengers had disembarked.


Identifying Higher Level Themes
I transcribed and analyzed the interview using inductive thematic analysis and triangulation The three stages of analysis: open coding of the study notes and the transcripts; the organisation of these 'codes' into related areas to construct 'descriptive' themes and the development of 'analytical' themes (using Affinity Diagram). These were used to extract the work roles, work activities, design requirements and the design-informing models: personas, user scenarios and user journey.

Affinity Diagram

 

Design Artefacts

User Journey
I mapped the user journey of a purser, as they share the basic responsibilities of a crew-member with additional responsibilities as their manager.





Personas
I constructed personas for two key audiences, i.e. the Purser and the Cabin Crewmembers. These personas included description of their tasks, background (experience, education) and the motivation towards their work.



User Scenarios
I constructed user scenarios that visualized both the current practices, and how we envisioned the future usage will look like in the new design. Such as how a smartwatch can be used to optimize flight attendants' collaboration and communication in-flight.

Prototypes

Sketching Initial Ideas
Like all of my other UX projects I sketched the initial pages to communicate my thoughts with the remote teams. I gathered feedback from my teammates, refined the sketches and moved from the low-fidelity mockup phase.



High Fidelity Prototype
I built the prototype using Adobe XD and Illustrator.




Visual Design and Implementation
We designed Smart Crew as a web-based application using the Tizen framework. It runs on Samsung Gear S2. We created a chat server using NodeJS and web sockets to support real-time communication and notifications to all or selected crew members. We used low-range Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons to track the location of crew members inside the plane to provide location awareness.



Users interact with the application by swiping up and down on the watch face to move within the spatial map of the plane (Smart Crew Watchface). Notifications appear on top of the spatial map and more details are available by tapping on the three dots on the right side of the watch face. This provides users with access to the main menu that shows the application's functionality (Main Menu). Below are detailed user flows of how the application is used for flight attendants.