Filling out Air France's statistics with 40 traveler stories

Client
Air France
Year
2018
Expertise
UX research

The challenge

Air France looks into the behaviours and needs of its users along the traveler journey, from booking the ticket to stepping off the plane. They want to deepen their user knowledge by creating personas. A statistical, quantitative approach had been used to build these profiles, but the results suggested a qualitative approach with travelers was needed.

Filling out Air France's statistics with 40 traveler stories

Project flow

01. Framing
02. User interviews
03. Field observation
04. Data analysis
05. Persona creation

Study detail

Gathering traveler knowledge

To study air travelers' behaviours, we ran one-on-one phone interviews. This made it possible to recruit a wide range of profiles.

The first step to identifying traveler profiles: collecting data from real users.

We carried out around forty phone interviews with all kinds of travelers, recruited via a panel provider. The questions covered searching for and preparing the trip, the journey to the airport, and the experience after the trip.

Phone interview to understand users' needs and habits

An interview guide structured the conversations with participants. We favoured a personal approach and asked them to share their own experiences, memories and anecdotes to surface what made each profile distinctive.

40
phone interviews

Data analysis

Analysing and synthesising the data is a defining moment in building personas: it's about identifying the behavioural invariants in the material we collected.

From the mass of individual stories we gathered, we now need to draw out the broad trends.

The goal is to end up with a limited number of personas so they remain workable. Defining the right sub-groups makes it possible to identify which elements are invariant and which are differentiating: a major challenge.

Synthesising data collected during the interviews
Photo showing a phone and two computers from above

Creating the personas

After this collection phase we have a certain view of the user profiles, but it needs to be confronted with our client's view of their business.

A workshop is held with the Air France design team to share the main trends and the key insights from the phone interviews.
We then share our first take so the team can challenge it and together push it forward.
We start from the persona canvas, the behavioural elements that shape them, and work all the way to defining the typical profiles.

Co-designing the personas with the Air France team

The result is consolidated and a graphic design effort is carried out to produce deliverables that are pleasant to read and to display.

Presentation of the 4 anonymised "traveler" personas

Akiani combines a high level of human-factors expertise with the modernity of UX design. They know how to stay close to the needs and take into account the DNA of the client organisation.

Alicia Bogouslavsky, User Experience Manager at Air France

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