Context

One the busiest airports in Europe, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport tasked Edenspiekermann with improving passenger journey and creating a seamless experience from check-in to boarding. Using facial recognition technology, we aimed to reduce the number of steps it takes passengers to get through each checkpoint at the airport. This will allow passengers to self-process, without having to repeatedly show travelling documents.

I had the opportunity to conceptualize passenger flows, design error handling flows, prototype solutions and live test my proposals through several pilots.

Learnings

Designing for a complex environment like an international airport warranted a systemic design approach where I aimed to understand how elements fit together to form a whole. As this was my first design internship, I learnt what it meant to design with real world constraints and felt challenged to foresee the implications of every design decision. I was also challenged to be inclusive in every decision as airport passengers encompasses an array of demographics- individual travellers, couples, families, non-english speakers, height differences, non-passport holders etc.

In my design process, it became clear to me how important it is to ground every decision in user research and feedback. Despite efforts to approach design objectively, I realized how my process is always the result of learned patterns and familiarity. Conducting user testing made me realize how I make assumptions to fill in a mental image for the context I am designing for. During the user testing, I found several of my design decisions disproved or validated and also learnt passenger behaviours that I hadn’t considered in my ideation process.

Due to the NDA nature of the project, I’m not able to publicly share my work. Please feel free to get in touch with me for more details. I also wrote an article reflecting on my internship experience at Edenspiekermann. Feel free to take a read ☻