Working as a cabin crew member implies expending a lot of energy and following strict protocols. Over the course of a flight trip, they have to maintain efficiency in long hours of service on flights, adjust to ever-changing time-zones, and repeat this, sometimes, with very little time between journeys. Cabin crew members, being working tourists, have long been ignored in the development of their work environment, something that has not changed in a long time. To aid them in their jobs, we have envisioned a smartwatch based technology that each member uses throughout the flight.

iCrew is a smartwatch application envisioned for cabin crew members of Lufthansa. The application aids them throughout the timeline of the flight, by improving interactions between cabin crew members and reducing communication time; acting as an organizing assistant to make the process of foodservice and luggage onboarding faster and hassle-free; providing a system of co-ordinated breaks; all put together and automatically prompted from a dynamic flight timeline.

This product is placed along with a few speculated products, which could be installments in flights. This involves all flight equipment to be connected over IoT, giving constant feedback of status; sensors, attached to the seatbelts to know if they are buckled or unbuckled; sensors, installed within the overhead luggage compartment to know how much space is left in the compartment; A local GPS that tracks the position of the watch within the flight.

This project was built as a part of an Application Design course, the brief of which was to design a travel application. After an initial brainstorming session about technologies, contexts, users, and problems, we found an untapped potential in aircrew members as a user group to work for, since they are one of the stakeholders in the travel industry for whom there hasn't been much development in terms of new services and products

To have a holistic understanding of the air crew's routine, we started by writing and mapping every aspect of experience related to their work, based on secondary research

We conducted a few interviews with pilots and flight attendants to both validate our secondary research and to gain new information and insights

To build empathy with our users, we worked with them to understand and map out the moods and emotions they go through doing the tasks assigned to them during a flight

We listed all the pain points and categorized them based on how actionable and pressing the pain points were

To solve - luggage organization, breaks - do not disturb, serving special meals, crew requests, pilot communications

Solvable - amenity kits, passenger requests, call bell

Not solvable - cleaning toilets, locating seats, passenger conflicts, boarding mix-ups

As explained in the key features section, the app design does not consist of a home screen with menu options. Rather, it opens to a live timeline of the flight, which begins as the flight begins, and options for the different features show up as per schedule. Hence all tasks begin and end back at the timeline. Features like emergency help and crew messages can be accessed by a long press and swiping from the top respectively

The architecture went through multiple iterations to make sure that the number of options available to the crew were minimum, and so that each interaction end-to-end would take a maximum of 5 seconds

Based on the information architecture and the content needs for each screen, we tried drawing up wireframes, giving it its first look

These are the chosen and designed style components that build up the application and give it a consistent look and feel.

The components were put together with the content and information structure. Below is the look and feel of the application.

This project was a great opportunity to work with a user group I would've otherwise not interacted with. The project made us think about and uncover real needs that aircrew members face and design delightful experiences for a product that would add immense value to their everyday work. The challenge of designing for an interface like a smartwatch was quite stimulating and pushed me to learn the theories of WatchOS design systems and take it to implementation.

You can view and interact with the final prototype here

To read more about the project, you can view and download the documentation here