Frontier Flight Attendant Data Dashboard
Project Overview
The Inflight Experience department of Frontier Airlines is responsible for managing the Flight Attendants of the airline. They brought me onto their team looking to update their communications to be more effective and aligned with the Frontier brand.
Role: Designer of Communication and Branding
Team: I reported directly to the V.P. of the Inflight Experience department. I was the only intern in the department at the time and the only designer.
Timeline: 5 months
The Challenge
Flight Attendants have company emails, however a majority of them do not check their inbox, and a significant portion do not know how to log into their company email. Important operational changes are sent to their emails and these changes are going unread and unimplemented in a timely manner. Having uninformed Flight Attendants has resulted in operational errors, costing the airline greatly. Frontier Airlines needed to find a way to incentivize Flight Attendants to check their company emails on a consistent basis so they can prevent operational mistakes.
The Users: Frontier Flight Attendants
Age: 20-60+
Flight Attendants make up over 50% of the Frontier Airlines work force.
Flight Attendant attendance performance is tracked. If they are late or are unable to make their assigned flight too many times, they will be terminated.
Flight Attendants are primarily self-managing. They can go months without interacting with their supervisors, and they build their own schedules; making them an extremely self-driven work force.
Research
Community Observation
I reviewed job boards to see what previous Flight Attendants had to say about the company.
I attended an initial training graduation to compare the attitudes of Flight Attendants at the end of their career to Flight Attendants at the beginning of their career.
I traveled on 20 different Frontier flights in order to observe the on board behavior of Flight Attendants and view the dynamics between a full crew.
Contextual Inquiry
I participated in a full day of recurrent training
I attended initial training for several days
I toured 5 different bases
I spent significant time in 4 different crew rooms
User Interviews
I conducted interviews on 10 different flights, interviewing the entire crew (minus pilots).
I interviewed new hires (recent graduates of initial training)
I interviewed reserve crews
I interviewed Inflight Leadership, all of which have flown as Frontier Flight Attendants previously.
Major Themes
Motivations of a Flight Attendant:
A vast majority of Flight Attendants would describe themselves as a “people person”. Being a Flight Attendant brings them a great amount of personal satisfaction as they are able to meet and help people every day through their job.
Flight Attendants have a passion for traveling. When I asked people who applied to Frontier why they wanted to be a Flight Attendant, the most common answer was “Flight Benefits”.
Fear of Inflight Leadership
Flight Attendants don’t trust their supervisors. They feel that their supervisors are primarily looking for ways to get them in trouble. Additionally, they don’t view their supervisors as resources, and don’t feel comfortable going to them with an issue.
Flight Attendants don’t feel appreciated by the company. They don’t feel as though their hard work is recognized so they are unmotivated to offer excellent service.
Pain Points
Lack of transparency from the company.
Fear of Inflight Leadership/Lack of recognition.
Weekly Stats Email Before
When I arrived at Frontier, the Flight Attendants were receiving emails every week with the attendance performance data for themself and their base. While it is valuable for Inflight Leadership to communicate performance for disciplinary reasons, I found in my research that a majority of Flight Attendants don’t care about attendance performance data. More often than not it became just another email in their inbox that was left unread.
Design Goals
The pain points I set out to address were the lack of recognition and lack of transparency coming from the company. I wanted to build a tool that would inspire a feeling of empowerment, instead of a feeling of being “a cog in a machine”. I wanted to provide the Flight Attendants with information that would be valuable to them personally, as well as positively motivate them. I decided that redesigning the weekly attendance performance email into a data dashboard would be the most effective way to accomplish this because data is one of the most objective form of communication. I knew that I could use the system already in place to generate and send the dashboards out, but change the interface and data categories.
I wanted this data dashboard to appeal to the Flight Attendants so much that they would be excited to check their inboxes for the weekly updates. My goal was that this information would be so fundamentally valuable to them, that it would incentivize them to open their company emails.
Final Design
To effectively curate data that would be relevant to Flight Attendants and motivate them, I had to draw upon what I learned in my research, which is that Flight Attendants are self-driven, they love people, and they love traveling. I centered the data around their personal performance in the context of where they have gone, and the people they have interacted with.
The weekly data email is no longer just a tool for communication, but it is a tool for Flight Attendants to set and track goals in their career.
To achieve this product, I worked with the data specialist in the inflight department to ensure the end product could be generated from inflight resources and efficiently sent through company systems. I presented my designs to the head of the inflight department and the V.P. of Communication for feedback. We went through multiple rounds of revisions until they felt confident distributing the emails to Flight Attendants.
Challenges faced
A challenge that I did not anticipate going into this project was the limiting factor of working with the preexisting system that sends this data. As I became more familiar with how the data is generated and shown, I realized I was very limited in terms of what visuals I could use. In my initial mockups, I had included maps and more complex vector based graphics but they couldn’t be quickly generated on the back end. As I was already struggling to pack a large quantity of data in the limited amount of space, I had to get creative with what visuals I would use to increase the readability of the dashboard. While it took many different iterations, I found a solution that maintains the readability of the data and can be generated quickly. I am glad that I continued through the trial and error process as I knew there would not be a “quick fix” for this challenge.
Conclusion
As I reflect on this project, I feel that this experience taught me how valuable it is to take extensive time to understand your user fundamentally and thoroughly. Because I spent over two months with the Flight Attendants, and living life from their perspective, I felt extremely confident in my ability to design something that would be valuable to them. This was proven when the data dashboard was launched and received immediate positive feedback. Flight Attendants were thrilled to be able to track their own careers and felt empowered by their own accomplishments, just as I had dreamed! The results validated my process, and I walked away from this project feeling incredibly proud not only of myself, but also of my users. I continue to feel a deep compassion for all of the Flight Attendants I met while at Frontier.