iPad app for flight
attendants of S7 Airlines.

The challenge was to create a huge system (10 integration systems, backend, frontend, analytics, and design) to get rid of hard copies (more than 10 kg per flight) for flight attendants, who were supposed to greet passengers already having full information about them in order to provide a unique service on board:

• to improve the quality of the passenger service to attract and retain customers;
• to automate the work of the flight attendants;
• to obtain analytical information for the company development.

Transferring all flight attendants’ work from paper to digital format in order to automate information processing and the performance analytics

Improving the quality of the passenger service provided by the flight attendants in order to increase the number of customers;

Providing special personalized service for business class passengers.

Two analysts are sent to the customer (S7 Airlines) in Domodedovo in order to study the company’s business processes and ways to automate them. In the course of the development, the analysts remain at the customer’s office and quickly respond to changes in the project and feedback from real users and the company’s management. They examine more than 10 systems to integrate with and interview the company’s experts about the goals and objectives of the system. The app is divided into many blocks:

• library functions;
• informative flight schedule;
• meal for economy class passengers, business class passengers, and special meal;
• general flight information block;
• defect alert system for passenger aircrafts;
• display of all kinds of cargo;
• emergency equipment cards;
• questioning of passengers;
• two types of chats for communication with the service desk and passenger service centers;
• work with reports;
• work with passengers;
• information about the flight crew.

The app runs offline most of the time or has poor connection quality, because the Internet is not available during a flight. At the same time, it must store over 200 megabytes of data required to perform one flight.

Following to the results of analytics, the UX designer develops clickable prototypes for the entire app. The customer evaluates the app usability and adds comments on how to better assemble the information for more convenient use during a flight.

The customer gets a ready-made prototype of the future app even before the design is developed and the full-fledged development is begun. This eliminates worries about the final result and saves time by avoiding future fixes.

As-is

A flight attendant has paper documentation. Some documents exceed 1,000 pages. There are more than a hundred documents. They are very heavy. It is extremely difficult to quickly find the necessary section in lots of hard copies. The documents are regularly revised, after which 1,000 pages must be reprinted and handed over to 1,000 flight attendants in person.

Realized

All documents are uploaded to iPads from the network. An advanced library for reading documents has been developed, because the native iOS library does not support the multi-level document structure and does not allow to insert video instructions.

The app monitors the upload of new documents, displays unread ones and, depending on the type of the document privacy, limits the ability to print it and send it by e-mail.

A schedule for a flight attendant has some specifics. The flight attendant can change up to 4 time zones per day, and it is important for them not to get confused. With this in mind, the location selection has been enabled. The schedule will line up depending on the time zone of the flight attendant’s location, which prevents them from missing a flight.

The flight attendant should be aware of several times of the flight departure and arrival:

• scheduled time;
• estimated time;
• actual time.

Cabin Crew Pad displays all the times in a convenient interface and is constantly connected to the server to display delayed flights and to notify passengers about the real departure time.

Cabin Crew Pad contains all the information about a passenger. It will display what meal the passenger ordered on a previous flight, whether they are a member of S7 Airlines loyalty program, whether they have a pet in the cargo compartment or are hearing-impaired and need special assistance. The app will show a map of the transit airport for the next flight, and the flight attendant will help with the navigation at the arrival airport.

Reporting processes have been automated. The flight attendants fill out everything on their iPads now. Each report was subjected to usability tests, which allowed to reduce the time it took to fill out the reports more than twice compared to filling them out on paper.

The reports can now also be analyzed in the dashboard.

Senior cabin crew have information about the flight crew. They assign the crew their place in the aircraft using the Cabin Crew Pad and leave comments on the team operation.

Getting rid of all the hard copies;

Briefing on the tablet only;

Filling out and storing reports in the document management system;

Improving the passenger service;

СForming the data acquisition system to develop the company’s service;

We published just a small part of our work, because the secret blocks are under the NDA, so we cannot reveal all the secrets. New goals have already been set for the year ahead. Our company has been developing a project for S7 Airlines for more than 3 years now, our team holds meetings with 100+ flight attendants every six months, receives feedback from real users, and improves the system.