Skybnb

Data Visualization of Fight Delays

INTRO

Flight delays and cancellations are, unfortunately, part and parcel of air travel. When a delay or cancellation occurs, it is indiscriminate about who it attacks and frequently causes stress and inconvenience. While the reasons for flight delays and cancellations are numerous, the overall outcome is the same: a unexpected hindrance to a traveler’s itinerary.

Skybnb visualizes the flight delay patterns of 7 airlines over the year between 10 airports, empowering travelers to make smart decisions when planning trips, and allowing airports to adjust their flight schedules to provide better service.

Role
  • UX/UI Designer
Info
  • Team Project of 4
Year
  • Aug 2016 – Dec 2016
Deliverables
  • Mockup
  • Prototype
DESIGN GOAL

A Smart Flight Delay Tracker

  • How can we visualize flight delays to see if there is a pattern to their occurrence?
  • Can we help travelers pick flights that are less likely to be delayed?
  • Can we help airports and airlines work on their punctuality?

Our goal is to build a visualization of flight delay data from 2015 with the intent to provide an overview of flight delay length and frequency, allowing for comparison between airline performance and the ability to see delays based on time of day and year on a airport to airport basis. This can be a useful tool for airlines to improve their customer experience and can give travelers a flight prediction system to help plan their trips.

01

Database

Dive Into Data

BTS is a statistical agency, the premier provider of up-to-date (latest available data from July 2016) transportation statistical knowledge that offers researchers data that is to a large degree guaranteed in both accuracy and completeness. Data Source

We want to visualize the arrival and departure delay for every domestic flight in 2015 of seven major airlines in the United States of America.  Each item represents one flight and has attributes including flight number, date, airline, origin airport, destination airport, scheduled departure time, departure delay, scheduled arrival time and arrival delay. Examples of these items are shown below.

02

User Scenario

Analytical Questions To Answer

LEISURE TRAVELER
When leisure travelers plan a trip, they may or may not know when and where to go. They usually choose their flight based on its price and past performance.
  • 1. The overview of flight delays at this time of year.
  • 2. How do the delay rate and delay time vary during the day at this time of year?
  • 3. Could there be more delays in the morning and fewer at night?
  • 5. Which airline performs best in its potential departure time range?
  • 6. For the best airline, which flight is the one that has the least delay rate or delay time?
BUSINESS TRAVELER
For business travelers, they are likely to have a strict time schedule. As such, they already known the departure city,  destination city, and necessary arrival and departure time when shopping for a ticket. What they are looking for is the flight that fits these criteria with the shortest delay.
  • 1. If I want to depart on Wednesday morning to arrive at their destination in time for an afternoon meeting,  which flights are likely to depart on time that morning?
  • 2. Can these flight also arrive at the destination on time?
  • 3. To make sure that i can arrive on time, which airline among these group has the best overall performance in terms of flight delays?
Airport Manager
For airport managers, they want to know the history of delay data at an airport under certain conditions, thus allowing them to approximately forecast the delay and arrange standby flight plans as needed. Also, they can adjust their flight plans to provide better service.
  • 1. Did we have an abnormal number of delayed flights on any day?
  • 2. Is there any flight that is consistently delayed from day to day?
  • 3. Is the average delay time for an airline’s flights within an acceptable range (0-15 minutes)?
  • 4. How often do long delays happen (30+ minutes)?
  • 5. Are flights delayed more at any particular airport?
  • 6. Do our Christmas Eve flights mostly arrive on time?

03

Iteration

Design Explorations

I did some explorations and sketches, showed them to the professors and people who are interested in and finalized the best way of representation.

04

deliverables

Final Design & Prototype

We made it clear that our visualization project would serve as more of an exploratory tool for our target users, to help with flight delay trend/pattern detections over time. Design and implementation of the tool should therefore focus more on the handiness and flexibility of the tool-utilizing experience, instead of providing solutions for specific delay problems, say, offering users flight suggestions to take in order to avoid severe delays.

Our design proposal has multi-coordinated views, containing 4 parts: a menu bar at the top, an x-y coordinate view on the left, two bars section (contains 2 bars) at the bottom, and a cards list on the right.