KLM has the ambition to be become most customer-centric airline company. Focusing on customer intimacy, KLM defines their purpose: Moving your world, by creating memorable experiences. In order to be successful towards customers, KLM has to start on employee level first, with the cabin crew to be more specific. For cabin crew, their journey start in the KLM crew center. The most important part of their preparation is the crew briefing. Here, they mainly discuss flight safety and information about the flight and passengers, while the main purpose of the briefing is team forming. In this magical moment crew walks in as 3 to 5 individuals and has to transform into a strong team with KLM-spirit. The current rooms are experienced as functional, instead of motivating, inspiring or empowering. So, there is a lack of support by the environment to form an optimal cabin crew team, and therefore no memorable on board performance is created for customers.
This thesis is divided in three main phases; Exploration, Creation and Finalization, adding an User Centered approach by implementing four design sprints. In the Exploration phase, insights were gathered by analyzing the current briefing situation, and by performing an internal and external analysis including research about the corporate vision and developments, a global trends analysis and comparison with similar briefing settings. All analysis during the Exploration formed the design vision:
Enhance the briefing experience and setting for the KLM crew center. The design should support the team forming and efficiency of the briefing process of EUR flight for KLM cabin crew.
Exploration is progressing gradually to the next phase Creation, since the design sprints involve an iterative process containing research, creation, tests and evaluation. To gain insights about the crew preferences, different aspects of the design and interaction vision were tested, namely connect, inspire, comfort, privacy, intuitiveness, openness and efficiency. To structure the insights of the user tests, an unique briefing journey was created and five interesting design challenges were defined. These challenges were the starting point for the ideation.
In the Finalization phase of the project, the design proposal was presented: the Blue
Connect. The design is a meaningful piece of furniture placed in an inspiring environment, especially designed for the future KLM crew center as an innovative solution for the cabin crew briefing area. The driving force behind the design is that the setting supports the experience and efficiency of the briefing, and provides a moment of connecting; the Blue Connect enhances the transformation of individual crew members into a strong, focused and confident bonded team.
In the last part of the report, the design proposal is evaluated. The overall response was very positive and inspiring. All participants agreed that they would likely use the EUR design proposal. And finally, a cost estimation and some recommendations for further development of the design are presented as a final outcome of this thesis.