Redesign a flight ticket
How to re-design a chaotic flight ticket?
In this week, we were required to re-design a flight ticket below:
There are several problems behinds:
- No hierarchy. It is hard to know where to look at it as there are too much information on the ticket.
- Redundant information. Though the ticket will be teared while boarding, some information could still be removed or shown only once.
- No grid. No grid has been applied so the whole layout looks chaotic and disordered.
- Neglecting the font design mis-conveys the information because nothing stands out. Users fail to tell the sequence of importance of the information.
- Lack of color contrast makes the ticket lacks sense of beauty.
I started researching and analysing about the elements I am not familiar with, then catagorized the elements into:
- Information for a passenger: Name, Gate, Boarding time, Flight number, Departure , Destination, Seat, Bags
- Information for airport staff: TSA check, Docs, BCN, Booking number, date, barcode
- Airlines branding information: Logo, skyteam membership
To understand what will be the most important elements for a passenger and re-design the hierarchy, I imagine myself standing in the airport and go through the whole experience from arriving at airport to a desination.
Here is the process I sketched on my notebook:
From this sketch, I noticed the information can be categorized by the journey of a passenger: Airport/security wise and passenger wise; Pre-boarding and after boarding. So I divided the boarding pass to three part and re-design below: 1) information for airport/security. 2) information for passenger before boarding. 3) information for passenger after boarding.
So I sketched a version on my notebook:
Before I started putting it on Illustrator, I did some research about boarding pass of different airlines to find out the most important information in their pespective.
Delta: Gate, Time and Seat are highlighted.
American Airlines: Flight, Seat and Time are hightlighted.
Here are my final design:
About this re-design ticket:
- The first part of the ticket is for airport staff and security/immigration check. I applied the icon “TSA pre” to replace the original word in order to make it concise.
- The second part is for the passenger before boarding. The gate and boarding time are the most important information they are looking for, so I highlighted the font. I applied an icon of flight to make the ticket looks vivid.
- The third part is for the passenger after boarding. Seat is the most important information for passenger so I highlighted it. Also, the information of bag is required after arrival so I put it into the third part. I applied some icons to make it looks good.
- I removed another barcode because it is only required once.
Besides, I designed another version for the branding of the ticket. The color and font are exactly the same one shown on Delta Style Guide.
It is an exciting homework and I really enjoyed the process of re-design it. I love to see things in different perspectives and re-design things we are already familiar with. As a frequent traveller, I am excited to re-design the boarding pass. Also, big thanks to Hayeon Hwang and Winnie Yoe who taught me how to use Adobe Illustrator and helped me to solve problems . This is my very first time to use AI to design something, and I am proud of the result.
Reference:
Delta Style guide: https://news.delta.com/delta-logos
Icon source: Google image.
