The Baby Comfort Class is a product-service system designed for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, to improve the journey of parents with infants from preparation to destination.

The system was developed through an extensive research with involved stakeholders: parents, infants, cabin crew, surrounding passengers, and KLM.

The result is a system that is aimed at reducing stress of parents through the fostering of engagement of the airline by introducing several online and offline solutions. The picture below shows the service touchpoints combined with the customer journey in the service blueprint.

Digital Design

A very important part of the service is the redesign of the current "children traveling" page, for parents prepare their travel often online. The interaction on the current page is not very interactive information is disorganized according to the user's needs and thus not easy to use.

The redesigned mock-up page is divided into different tabs for child ages with dissimilar airline regulations. The page starts with a short movie to obtain the most important information. More detailed information is thereafter easily found under the tabs. Also a link to the webshop is created to aid the parents in finding the right products and to up ancillary sales. To help the parents even more with packing, as bringing the right products for your infant is crucial, the concept of the "packing help App" was created. Integrated into the current KLM App will be a personal packing help after you bought a ticket. The recommended items are personalizable for you and your travel company.

Sketch of the helpful Packing Help App, showing the various types of products recommended

Rewards

This master graduation project is rewarded with an Excellent which means it is among the top 10 percent of the graduating projects that semester. Next to this it is exhibited during the Dutch Design Week 2015 at the Klokgebouw as a part of the “Mind the Step” exhibition.

Promotional picture for the Dutch Design Week 2015, Mind the Step Exhibition

Process

The process of this project has been very user focussed and had a multi-method research approach as can be seen at the scheme below. Starting out with the wish of KLM to design a manner for infants to travel comfortably but not on the lap of their parents. This goal was stretched as I believe more research was needed to create an effective improvement in the customer experience. The goal was therefore: Improving the inflight comfort of parents and infants(0-1 year old).

To create insight into the user group I observed infants, had a robotic training baby to see what it is like to be a parent and interviewed parents about flying long haul with infants.

To design a concept with implication possibilities I build a network at KLM consisting of people working at Inflight Services and Marketing. Last but not least the BabyTrayBed was tested on an actual flight to Curaçao.

The evaluation with parents, cabin crew and KLM of the service design resulted into many positive comments.

Project Process from start to finish