Ticket Mastered

Face lifting the Spirit Airlines ticket.

Interaction Design | Information Design

Project Partner | Phuc Huynh

Introduction

With this project, I teamed up with a partner and chose an informational artifact to re-design. We chose a plane ticket because it's pretty ubiquitous and flexible to work with. We based our design on the Spirit Airlines ticket because we had one on hand that we could pick apart.

The Spirit Airlines plane ticket.

Researching the Artifact

Outlining important information sections.

We began by doing some informal research on plane tickets to figure out what important information we should include in our designs. We noticed that there was some information on the ticket that was not useful to some of the stakeholders involved such as the traveler and the TSA agent. For one, we felt that the original ticket had too much text on it and that it was too difficult to understand. I tried to fix this by grouping the information so that the different sections related to flight times, locations, and gate and seating could easily be found at a glance.

First Attempts

The first iteration of tickets.

There were some issues with these first few versions of the ticket. I was trying too hard to design from an artistic approach and less so from a functional approach. While the information itself and the way it was grouped was not terrible, some of my designs were a bit distracting and too colorful.

Learning From Our Mistakes

In this next iteration of the tickets, I made some attempts at color again, this time after studying some more color theory. I also included some greyscale designs for economy. I attempted to make stronger use of gesture and line to guide the user through the ticket. I also used contrasting colors and shapes to distinguish different sections from one another.

My second attempt.

These tickets were received better than the first ones, though this time, my font choice was a bit too authoritative and unapproachable. We were also advised to eliminate color and stick to greyscale instead.

Trying Again...

Due to the success of one of our previous prototypes, we decided to keep the same information that but change its format.

Greyscale tickets.

...And Again

We experimented with greyscale tickets both in vertical and horizontal orientations due to the different ways in which people might read. We also adjusted some the fonts that we used to give the ticket a sense of friendliness and reliability.

Some of the previous iterations were deemed good enough to continue refining.

Finally, a Good One

In this last round of tweaking, we lightened the darker values of the successful ticket even more. We also decided that its horizontal orientation was more usable than vertical orientations since it conformed to the way most people read and was conducive of easily finding information at a glance. This final iteration became our submission for the project.

The final prototype.

What's Next?

Since we didn’t conduct any formal user research, we should begin with that if we were to pick up this project again. I would also like to conduct a study to see if redesigning the ticket has any effect on Spirit Airlines' profitablity.