AeroAccess

Company Boeing

Timeline 6 months (Jan 2025 - Jun 2025)

Role UX Design Intern

Three smartphones displaying airline and entertainment app interfaces, including flight details, a seat map, and movies and TV shows.

Introduction

AeroAccess began with a single word from Boeing: accessibility. There were no defined users, no scoped problem, just a mandate to explore. Through discovery research, our team identified visually impaired travelers as an underserved group whose airport experience is often shaped by inaccessible wayfinding and communication systems.

The Challenge

Our Boeing-sponsored project tasked us with "improving accessibility in aviation," meaning no defined users, no scoped problem, just a mandate to explore. It was one of our first experiences designing into real ambiguity: our first task wasn't finding a solution, but identifying a specific, impactful problem worth solving.

Through secondary research, we identified our target audience: visually impaired travelers, an underserved group facing consistent barriers throughout their travel experience.

My Role

As one of four UX designers, I conducted interviews with 5 visually impaired travelers to understand their pain points when navigating airports and flights independently. I helped synthesize our findings into key insights that shaped the team's design direction and helped design the full experience across all 15 screens. With my specific focus on the in-flight entertainment system's audio description feature, I ensured visually impaired passengers could access the same movie and show content as sighted passengers.

Four diverse young adults standing together indoors in front of a wooden wall, smiling at the camera, two women wearing white shirts with name tags, background includes informational posters.

The AeroAccess team presenting at the UW HCDE Showcase.

Our Problem Statement

How might we enhance accessibility to ensure visually impaired passengers have a safe, informed, and independent in-flight experience?

The Process

With no predefined problem or users, our process had to start broad before narrowing. We began by empathizing directly with visually impaired travelers, then used those insights to guide ideation before committing to a direction in Figma.

Research Findings

The Solution

01
Research

Abstract gradient background with pastel colors transitioning from cream to green and yellow.

  • Five 40 min interviews with visually impaired travelers.

  • Synthesized interview notes through affinity mapping to find common themes.

02
Ideation

A soft gradient transition from pink in the top left to green in the bottom right.

  • Multiple rounds of team brainstorming and SWOT analysis, refined through weekly check-ins with Boeing stakeholders that helped narrow our focus before moving into prototyping.

03
Prototype

Blurred image with blue rays or streaks radiating from the center.

  • Two rounds of Figma wireframes: low-fidelity concepts reviewed by Boeing, then refined into a high-fidelity prototype.

We recruited participants by partnering with the UW Disability Resource Center and compensating travelers for their time, then expanded our pool through snowball sampling as interviewees referred other visually impaired travelers. Through five semi-structured interviews with visually impaired travelers, several key challenges emerged that shaped our design direction:

  1. Flying independently is a significant source of stress and anxiety

  2. Flight communications — like seatbelt status, pilot announcements, and updates — are easy to miss

  3. In-flight navigation, including finding a seat and locating the restroom, is consistently difficult

  4. Entertainment systems are largely inaccessible, leaving a gap in the in-flight experience

These findings shaped three core experiences within our final prototype: Boarding Pass, In-Flight, and Entertainment.