Kalani Kordus

bad interface, originally uploaded by kalani kordus.

Southwest Airlines Boarding Lines
(Las Vegas Airport)

The problem: Limited space
The (attempted) solution: Have only two lines, but modal

Two main poles in the front of the line have 3-faced rotating signs with letters indicating the group (A,B,C), and numbers indicating which half of the line travelers are in (1-30, 31-60). The poles in the middle have the subsection numbers (1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-25, 26-30).

So in theory this idea works great because you can potentially always have one line queuing up while the other is boarding, but this implementation was very poor.

The main –but not only– pitfall of this implementation was that the group signage had to be manually spun to the current boarding group by the gate attendant. Two problems surfaced via this implementation :

1. The gate attendant would turn the sign to the wrong group letter, or somewhere in between
2. The gate attendant would forget to turn one or both of the signs when announcing the next boarding group

In my case, I was a victim to the ole’ “gate attendant forgot to turn the sign”.

Another problem was that there was only enough room for 4 people in each number block. So the 5th person always took up at least half of the real estate of the first section of the adjoining block. This exponential spilling renders the “marking” of every block past the second useless. Nice try… but your average American is just way too big, not to mention everyone has a carry-on or two they are lugging around with them, taking up even more space.

Hey SWA!…a few suggestions for improving this design:

1. Display the subsections on the floor as well as above. In addition, you could also have some visual indicators on the floor to suggest travelers stand with their carry-ons to one side of them, allowing travelers to stand closer together. If you don’t have the room to realistically accommodate  travelers in the marked subsections though, you are better off just getting rid of them, because it just creates confrontation when travelers unintentionally cut in front of one another due to the lack of space.
2. Use large low power digital displays for the group signs. This obviously implies that the group sign no longer has to be turned (human error), and in addition you could automate it with the boarding process.

Yet, even if all of these suggestions were implemented, it still doesn’t change that once you get aboard the aircraft it’s a free-for-all. I try to avoid SWA if I can for this reason.