Hey Raena

Tyler Thompson’s post about redesigning boarding passes was included in an edition of Russ Weakley’s links for light reading last month (yeah yeah, I know, I’ve been sitting on this for awhile). He’s had a crack at redesigning the boarding pass he received from Delta on a recent trip. Much oohing and ahhing ensued, cause everyone knows boarding passes are icky, right? The modern air travel experience is kind of soulless, and some visual niceties would really make the whole travel experience seem a lot less sterile, yeah? Let’s take a look at those.

Well, sure. But the problem with Tyler’s alternative boarding passes, and particularly the second one, is that they kind of suck. In fact, some aspects of the designs introduce new problems that weren’t part of the original pass. It puts aesthetics over usability, and that’s a recipe for truly shitty design.

OH NO SHE DI-INT

You heard me.

Look, I’m not some hipster Moley-skeen-a-toting, MacBook-wielding Design Wanker™. (No, I’m just your regular nondesigner Moleskine-toting MacBook-wielding wanker.) But here’s one thing I do know: I know that when you’re designing an artefact for everyday use, you have to put usability over your predilection for the trendy font-of-the-week. You can’t design something in a vacuum. People have to actually use this stuff.

Here’s another: I have flown a lot. One year I was on the road for four months out of twelve. That’s a third of a year eating shitty airport food and living out of suitcases. I’ve been early, late, delayed, cancelled, bumped, missed a couple, been affected by industrial action, and even stranded due to lightning strike. I know a little about the whole flying thing.

So, you know, I do hope you’ll feel free to take this with whatever quantity of salt you feel appropriate, but here it is.

• The text, with characters which are fully four times as high as they are wide, is hardly what I’d call legible. Imagine you’re an airline steward, and you had to read 180 of these four or five times a day. Is this really doing you any favours in the legibility department? Is it easier to read than the craptaculous thermal printed monospaced stuff you usually see? I don’t think so, kids.

• My name (all 22 characters, counting spaces) is longer than Tyler’s. In fact, lots of names are longer than Tyler’s. We don’t all have a name that lines up with his grid perfectly. What happens to all this lovely griddy goodness when you have a long name? I reckin my name would well overrun the coloured area; what happens then? Would it wrap in an ugly fashion on the second one? What if you’re flying Business and not Coach?

• Do I board at 5.10pm, or depart at 5.10pm? Did I check in at 5.10pm? Do I arrive at 5.10pm? Why am I wasting even a second trying to interpret that?

• What the hell is going on with the teeny weeny little numbers? Imagine you are a passenger on a late flight. You approach the counter and ask the attendant whether you will make your connecting flight. She says, “Sure, I’ll check. What’s your booking reference?” Now, look at this pass. Where is your booking number? It’s cool, I’ll wait, and so will the fifty other people in line behind you, while you look for it. Or, since I assume she knows which of these arcane strings if your booking reference, you can hand it to her and she can squint to read it herself. Either way: suck.

• What purpose does the map serve? It bears no resemblance to the journey itself. And if you don’t regularly use Google Maps, would you understand the purpose of the teardrop-shaped icon on the rightmost stub? If not, that’s more wasted time trying to interpret its meaning.

• Why is THIS much space given over to the gate number? Maybe they do stuff all different over there, but I cannot remember the last time I caught a flight where the gate was known very far in advance. If I were printing this boarding pass at home the day before, or the same morning, what goes in this spot?

• What is the point of displaying the journey as airport codes, other than an exercise in pure wankitude? Why would you rely on something as obscure and arcane as this? Here, I’ll show you: you’re travelling in Australia between two major cities. You can probably guess where this flight originates, but where is this flight going? (Don’t cheat and Google it.) How confident would you be that the airline issued you the correct boarding pass?

When all you have is a hammer

A boarding pass really ought to be a functional object. Its job is to get you aboard the plane. It has a defined, predictable appearance to help airline and airport staff deal with you. It needs to be simple enough for a first-time traveller to use without making them learn stuff like which arcane series of characters is their booking number, or memorising every airport’s IATA code. It should be simple and clear.

What Tyler’s produced really doesn’t hit the spot. It’s pretty, sure, but I’m having a lot of trouble seeing how these redesigns actually solved a genuine problem. All that seems to be happening here is an exercise in how it would be totes awse to use his favourite display typeface.

There is so much more to design than ‘make shit prettier.’

PS: AVV is Avalon, Melbourne’s second busiest airport, which is used chiefly by Jetstar.