A Nomadic Visual Design Lesson – The Airport
06. Aug, 2010 
6 Comments
Last month I wrote A Nomadic User Experience Lesson – The Airport about how navigating an airport is a great way to point out key concepts in user experience design. As a traveler, we are literally pushed into new places and times, bleary-eyed from exhaustion, and are expected to easily make our way to find the loo, the baggage claim, and ultimately the exit so we can get on home or to our destination. To guide our path, we rely on the sights and sounds around us to make sure we’re headed in the right direction.
Now that we’ve looked at the elements of user experience – Users Needs, Interactions, Information Architecture, Navigation and Information Design – we can talk about the most visible layer, Visual Design. Without the underlying framework, the visuals can be merely aesthetic and arbitrary. Good design reinforces that framework.
User experience offline
In the airport, we can be bombarded with information. But somehow, we are able to filter the right info and can determine what we’re seeing. For example, we have been trained to understand that the big sexy looking posters and billboards on the walls are probably ads. They stand out from the Departures/Arrivals screens, the gate numbers, and the wayfinding signage hanging from the ceilings. Why? Because most airports have a brand standard or some kind of guideline that indicates that “their” signs should look a certain way – typefaces, color palette, letter height, placement, etc. This serves 2 purposes:
1). Make it easier to provide consistent graphics throughout the airport for simpler production.
2). Make it simpler for the traveler to find authoritative information, meaning information I can trust because the people in charge put it there.
A great example of where one can fall into a pit of confusion is a simple magazine – let’s take Cosmo. Women know what I mean here – have you ever been reading away about how to make dark circles disappear in ten days, flip the page and then encounter what seems to be a continuation of the article but is really an advertorial put out by a medi-spa or cosmetics company? This happens all the time and is intentionally effective because the ad company designed their ad to look like authoritative or editorial content written by the mag. You are led to believe that this is a testimonial of how the writer looks ten years younger, when in fact it’s a promotion for under-eye cream!
Now, imagine if you had this kind of mix-up at the airport and instead of getting the general info you wanted from the tourism board about the area, you headed straight for the counter of a pushy travel agency selling their wares. In the airport, we want to minimize confusion for the traveler by making it very clear that our Official Information Kiosk is not going to be mistaken for a retail kiosk by using the airports brand guidelines. Clean, minimal, prominence and consistency help the traveler quickly scan his/her environment and make a beeline for the right spot.
User experience online
How does this talk of airport graphics and confusing Cosmo ads relate to the user experience on the web? Well, the same thing happens there. When web designers are tasked with exposing and pointing a user to the “right” info, we pay special attention to hierarchy, affordance, and branding guidelines. We use negative space, linework, color, contrast, scale, and other elements of art and design to direct the eye to the proper places on the screen, in the right order. We make the critical links that are most important larger, more prominent, and closer to the top of the screen so our visitors see them first. We put secondary or tertiary info in smaller containers or boxes so they’re not the first thing the eye sees. We use familiar icons to make our visitors feel at ease and make it simpler to scan for the right item. We put things in the same place on each screen so that our visitors can learn quickly where to look for certain links or types of info. We make it clear that ads are ads by providing captions and always putting them in the header or the sidebars at a certain size. We don’t use too many typefaces and pick a font family to create consistency and subtly indicate that any deviations from those typefaces on the screen might be a marketing message, special alert or an advertisement.
UX is everywhere, not just online
Whether you travel a lot or not, it’s clear to see that there are examples of user experience design hard at work all around us. Think about everything from finding your way around the grocery store or local shopping mall to the instruction manual for that new bike you just bought for your kid. Great design helps people find, make, and do the things they want or need to get done and its starts with keeping this idea at the center of all that we do as designers.
Happy users = happy designers.
Thanks for stopping by. I am a freelance web and graphic designer in Southern California with a crazy passion for new technology, innovative art, and purposeful design. 
Awesome examples! And what a great way to explain UXD: “Great design helps people find, make, and do the things they want…”
This is a great analogy. Any type of travel is comparable to a website – and to take it one step farther, just think about the international aspects. Many US sites are perused in other countries, sometimes with a language barrier. Signs and signals and imagery have to be immensely clear.
Thanks Joe! It really does just come down to that and it’s what keeps me focused.
Thanks Marli. As a travel lover, I encounter these scenarios all the time and anytime I get “lost on the trail” so to speak, I find myself retracing my steps and thinking: “how could that have been avoided?” or “how could that have been easier for the next visitor?”
Would like to add a small addition to the discussion. There are additional components that can be critical in both online and non-online experience. These are “when” and “where” the information become available. After the static info is acquired and understood by the “user” (or passenger in the airport case), the user has to perform the next task. it can involve moving to the next physical location or acquire another piece of info to make decision on what to do next. This is where some airport can be so easy to go through or they can be so confused and create frustration (e,g. Washington Dulles International Airport, you always run into so many people missing or about to miss their flight cause by chaotic and random info and direction.) The same applied to freeway/highway system in cities.
Timing and location of information can be another critical dimensions of the UX.
This is a great point Chaur-Fong. Timing and location are also key and vary by the experience. This is especially apparent with interfaces or even products that are critical to saving lives, dealing with safety management, and countless other applications when the you have nanoseconds to assess and quickly make your next decision, complete the next task, or take action. Thanks so much for your input!