During the first airport research we discovered that waiting at Fukuoka Airport can be a somewhat boring experience for kids. This results from the fact that there are no particular distractions or initiatives at the airport aimed at making their time more enjoyable. Based on this insight we have decided to focus on making the waiting more enjoyable for families with children, in other words: the family is our current target user and to symbolize this group we created a persona, the Suzuki Family.
Persona: Suzuki Family
To get out in the field as quickly as possible we transferred an earlier idea of the “Monster Aquarium” into a paper and a digital prototype. Even though this solution might seem a bit shallow on first sight (kids putting different monster body parts together to create their own monster) it helped us gaining insights in the way kids play, and it gave us an entrance to talk to parents about their experiences and pain points concerning waiting with kids.
A second important milestone for the project would have been our translate session with Kuboyama-San, an entrepreneur, and designer of interactive toys. His product facilitated an open ended form of play in which kids and parents could work together to build houses, costumes and more, using the brightly colored panels. But more importantly: his philosophy concerning open ended play has definitely broadened our horizons on what the possibilities are in designing for kids.
To create some order in all the insights and information we organized a session to extract some new design questions, based on the research done. You can see these main insights below. What we’ll be doing next is widening our view a bit again, and start going back into ideation. With the research in mind the solutions that will come out of ideation will be deeper and more relevant for the airport waiting experience of parents with kids.
