Navigating Information Overload with a Journey Based Information Compass

Navigating Information Overload with a Journey Based Information Compass: A framework to make KLM cabin crew feel up to date

Molenaar, Loeke (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Santema, Sicco (mentor)
Silvester, Sacha (graduation committee)
Gangadin, Mahender (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Strategic Product Design

2019-10-18

KLM, a Dutch airline, is renowned for their high levels of services and customer experiences. With their purpose ‘moving your world by creating memorable experiences’, maintaining those high levels of services is important. Cabin crew is for a big part responsible for those high levels of services. Making cabin crew feel the best of them and reaching optimal staff behaviour are therefore important goals of their managing department Inflight Services. For that reason, many tools for cabin crew have been developed and KLM has gone through multiple digital transformations. Although much effort is put into creating the optimal working climate, cabin crew suffers from information overload. This has led to the aim of this graduation project, namely reducing information overload among cabin crew. The thesis followed the X way of working. Starting with the SHERLOCK phase, a literature review and a channel, organisation and crew analysis has been done. The analyses showed factors playing a role in the occurrence of information overload. Additionally, it showed that channels are used by the organisation as a gate to push information to crew, while cabin crew wishes to pull the information according to their needs. This has led to the design challenge ‘making cabin crew feel up to date’. The intended solution should guide the organisation in becoming more crew centric, understanding the cabin crew needs in regards to information and with that move from a push to a future minded pull strategy. The following MICKEY phase aimed ideating solutions. The future vision was specified and learnings were drawn from strategies applied by other companies. The phase closed with a set of hypotheses. In the LEGO phase, the hypotheses were tested with minimum viable products. These tests showed that needs of cabin crew differ per phase of the journey and what the exact needs in each phase of journey were. The following DUMMY phase aimed at translating all these findings into a framework for the organisation and tangible solutions for crew. In multiple design cycles, the DUMMY phase closes with The Information Compass. The information Compass is the final deliverable of this thesis. The tool includes information-needs of crew per phase of the journey and can be used by the organisation to navigate those needs. The tool is written in the same style as the branding strategy and with that aims at creating coherence between the communication and organisation strategies. Ultimately, the tool aims at making cabin crew feel up to date. The information compass comes with a guide and 10 cheat sheets; one for each action crew undertakes. The cheat sheets give explanation about the needs and a clear, tangible example fulfilling the needs. The validation phase showed that cabin crew are enthusiastic about the solutions designed. The organisation values the solution and aims at using the tool to become more crew-centric in the way they send information and in the developed apps, and with that make cabin crew feel up to date. The thesis concludes with recommendations for future designs.

Information overload
Design
Airline
Cabin crew
Framework
user centric design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c85af300-b926-475c-b01d-9b358b665285

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Loeke Molenaar