Airport Assistant Application for Reducing the Traveler's Stress

Abstract

Air travel is a stressful process, and airports failed to alleviate it. A large portion of this stress is originated from passengers’ lack of information or hardship to gain it. One of the most important solutions for delivering on-demand information is using smartphones. Despite the abundance of mobile applications around air travel, they still could not appease the passengers’ stress. Most of the existing applications suffer from at least one of these problems: (1) covering only parts of passengers’ need for information, (2) Having lousy user experience design and being hard to use, and (3) lack of consideration for international and first-time travelers who are even more prone to the stress. The result of our study in the literature shows that stressors come to existence because of the unfamiliarity or uncertainty of passengers about the airport, flight, and their status in the boarding process. In many cases, if passengers are fed with proper information and in a proper way, then many of the stressors will be ineffective. In this research, we aim to design the prototype of an airport assistant application with the goal of reducing passengers’ stress. To this end, we study the causes of stress in the airport, identify the crucial information that users need to cope with the stress and use the UX principles to design a proper prototype. The evaluations show that all the problems with the existing applications are addressed in our prototype. So, we expect that if a real mobile app is created according to our prototype, it can decrease the passengers’ stress, hopefully to a good extent. We believe that the result of this study will potentially have an impact on improving the quality of air travel for a vast number of passengers.