Although this blog post is a few years old, I'd like to shed a little light onto why boarding passes haven't changed in years.<p>To redesign the boarding pass, you have to understand how the data is processed and presented. Often the terminals and printers are shared between airlines, so there has to be a standard.<p>Each airline uses something called a PECTAB. This a basically a template that has coordinates of where the data is to be printed (text & logo). It's loaded on the printer each time the airline terminal application (such as Sabre, Amadeaus, etc.) connects to the CUTE (Common Use Terminal Emulator, IATA standard) API hosted on the computer which acts as a gateway to the printers, OCR scanner, etc. Did I mention this is a shared terminal by several airlines that have completely different applications? :)<p>A lot of the BTP (boarding pass) printers either use the older dot style printing, but the newer thermal (GPP) printers are becoming more common because they are cheaper to maintain.<p>Unfortunately, the terminal emulators and CUTE standard hasn't kept up to date with the available technology, a lot airlines are still running on mainframes from 25+ years ago.
I like that we are integrating more and more well designed products and utilities in our day to day life; beautiful, easy to use objects are no longer a luxury. That by itself is a glorious win.<p>People, however, tend to forget the old but gold adage: "Form follows Functionality". I mean, this talented designer ventured into poking fun of the work of other people without even taking the time to understand the problem, the proposed solution, and the constraints that were/are in place.<p>Yes, his design is infinitely more good looking. But did the designer took into consideration how applicable is it in the real world, with real logistics and real business scenarios? No. Of course he didn't.<p>The reason I'm saying this is because I suffer those atrocities every day in my work, were I'm tasked with the coordination between journalists and designers for a business magazine.<p>Where I work, we believe that infographics' main mission is to help readers wrap their heads around things they wouldn't if we presented them as text or tables. That's the point of them being there in the first place. Making them pretty is just a way to make people look at them, and be happy while they learn something new. It is so satisfying to create such pieces.<p>Designers, however, seem to discard all of that, caring only about how trendy the damn gradient is. I was even called ignorant and 'noob' by a designer, one that I fought to recruit a week earlier, because I suggested making numbers readable, something he deemed old-fashioned and would ruin his master-fucking-piece.<p>I really hope that people will be more aware that design is not a goal by itself; it's a tool to make people care, learn and be more happy.<p>Edit: OMGrammar!
I find the tall skinny letters are much harder to read and random elements like the country map just add clutter. Giant color backgrounds are also distracting and probably make printing more expensive while lowering quality for people who print passes at home.<p>Overall I prefer existing boarding passes, which aren't actually that complicated these days. Also many people now use digital passes on their mobile phones that are much easier to use with built-in intelligence and real-time updates.
I think the new design is worse than the old design. Not a fan of the narrow font, crowding, and tiny labels (following, not leading, the numbers) for category. Am I flying from gate 22A in seat 11B or vice versa?<p>The labels for what the number IS should be nearly the same size as the number itself.<p>The departure time is listed, but the boarding time is not. The boarding time is more critical to know.
A far better attempt at redesigning the boarding pass was done by Timoni West:<p><a href="http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-pass-redesign" rel="nofollow">http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p...</a><p>Unlike the author of this post, West actually endeavored to understand the constraints and requirements before undertaking a redesign. That's the mark of a truly competent designer.
I dislike his redesign, because most of what he does is fix the fact that it's ugly. Large-printing the numbers is pointless when the labels are still teeny-tiny and the layout of the tearable stub doesn't match so it's non-obvious that it contains the same info.<p>Imho, the tearaway should clearly repeat the layout of the big one so the reader can see "this is the same".<p>I'd sort the data in order. Putting the zone at the end is wrong because you don't use it after the seat. First you need flight number and time, then you gate days where to go, then your zone says where to go, then your seat says where to go. It seems obvious to sort the data like that.
One thing that these types of articles tend to overlook is consistency across the different types of boarding passes.<p>You have home printed boarding passes that will be printed on all sorts of awful printers, with bad settings (like printing color to a b/w printer) and poor resolution.<p>Then, some will be printed on thermal printers at airports, and some on airport controlled thermal printers, some on airline controlled thermal printers. Different models, with different stock, etc.<p>Finally, the mobile boarding passes.<p>The employees checking these do better if there's some uniformity across the various formats. Similar for customers.<p>So, there is a bit of "lowest common denominator" in the current designs. It's on purpose.
The paper itself is another problem with modern boarding passes. I miss the old-style boarding passes (the kind you'd find a magnetic strip on), when they were printed on thick cardstock (that wouldn't rip if you put them in a pocket or in between the pages of your passport) and not the thin and squicky BPA-infused thermal paper that almost rips on its own.
What for?<p>I mean why do you need one? Most of the flights I take in Scandinavia don't have boarding passes I just use the credit card I used to buy the ticket. If a boarding pass is needed I can get it in the form of a QR code on my mobile when I check in online.
It's interesting that the pass has the boarding gate printed on it. I've only flown in Europe (and only started around six years ago), but the gates are available only half-hour or so from the closing time. Is it common in the US to know the gate in advance?
The main issue I have with this design is that it doesn't account for the cost of implementing the proposed changes.<p>For paper boarding passes, it's prohibitively expensive to upgrade the printers and self-check-in kiosks to support new-fangled boarding pass layouts. Plus, you have to do it at every airport around the world.<p>It would be far cheaper to have some professionally printed full-color paper templates to feed into the printers (see, for example, Virgin America boarding passes issued at SFO).<p>Plus, iPhone Passbook tickets are uniformly designed, and have the key information (seat number, boarding time) in slightly bigger bold font at the top. It would be far cheaper to get an airline to install eTicket readers (aka QR code scanners) at the few small airports that don't have them, and then to upgrade their mobile apps to support generating Apple Passbook boarding passes for the remaining ticket types that don't work (e.g. group fares).
Let's look at this from a tired traveler perspective. Not sure whether you had the joy of being on the other end of a transoceanic flight but typically by that time you have been up for too long, stressed from packing, passing security, immigration then sitting 10-12-16 hours in an overpressurized dry aluminium tube.<p>Your brain wants to shut down. You are staring at this piece of paper which has the flight number, the gate number and the seat number in roughly the same size, the same font and in every which way visually the same.<p>I did get dangerously close to mixing up my gate with my seat. More than once. It's an atrociously bad design.<p>And it's not that hard to improve. All it needs is more folds. First fold, flight / gate. You don't give a shit about seat so hide it. This doesn't require new printers , new standards or shit. Just one more fold in the paper. Is that so hard?
As someone with a suffix in their name, I'd like if the name portion could just stop corrupting my name. IIRC, the last airline took:<p><pre><code> First Name: John
Middle Initial: Q
Last Name: Smith
Suffix: III
</code></pre>
as input (<i>in separate fields!</i>, and in the above order) and printed that as:<p><pre><code> JOHNIII SMITH Q
</code></pre>
Note the lack of space separating the given name and the suffix, the odd positioning and ordering of <i>all</i> of the elements of the name…. This is nowhere close to how its represented on my legal ID, and I've never in my life written my name that way.<p>Then you take this boarding pass to security, where a TSA agent squints at it thinking to himself "this is definitely fake", until the barcode scans and it comes back as good.
<i>>This is the actual boarding pass I got from Delta. It's a nightmare. Note all the random alignments and spacing issues.</i><p>What on earth made him assume that these alignments and spaces were random? I bet the scanners that read them think they're gorgeous.
The first thing I couldn't help but notice was how much <i>ink</i> these new designs would use! That seems like a major design flaw for an industry with such tight margins.
Thoughts on having one "website" for a blog post? I think its kind of cool - gives more weight to the post. But it definitely creates a disconnect between the author and the post.. I can't navigate to the author's site for other work, or to find this blog post again, etc.
Can't we get rid of the boarding pass altogether?<p>I mean, I'm always carrying two things around the airport: my passport and the boarding pass.<p>I think this can be reduced to one thing: just my passport, by letting the airport deal with boarding electronically.
This is the boarding pass for the last flight I took: <a href="https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg</a><p>It has some of the changes seen in his redesign, but still a lot closer to the original one from Delta. I think it's perfectly fine and practical, despite not being exactly visually pleasant; all the information I care about is in big bold letters at the top, without any strange codes or abbreviations.
It's great that so much thought has been put into the design that is printed on boarding passes, but one thing that's always bothered me about them is the physical size.<p>Every passport is the same size, and you almost always are carrying your passport while flying.<p>If boarding passes were the same size as passports, they'd fit inside much more easily and make it a lot more convenient to carry.<p>Sure, the design printed on the paper is important too, but IMHO the size of the pass is far more important!
There's a purely practical thing that these need to deal with: sometimes when you board you hand over the end stub and keep the large portion, and sometimes you hand over the large portion and are given the stub .... This means that all (or enough) information needs to be on both bits .... You can't just put the seat number on one bit (or the flight number on one bit, as you may need it for customs forms later) etc etc
I like it, I think it's more readable compared to the one that they show as a current one on the top. It took me a while to find a departure time and gate number on the original boarding pass. All the important pieces like flight number, seat and departure time are really easy to read compared to the original.<p>The problem on the original is that they don't emphasize the important information pieces, all is printed in the same font style and size.
Meanwhile for Qantas in Australia on domestic flights, you just tap your frequent flyer card to check-in and scan it's barcode at the gate to board. It does print a small slip with your seat allocation on it at that point though.<p>Now someone just has to build e-Ink into the card.. which I know has at least partly been done by some of those virtual credit card startups.
I know KLM recently introduced boarding documents you can print and fold four-ways so that it was pretty much the size of your passport and if you have a two-flight connection there would be one on each side.
The overall details are pretty well laid out as well.<p>I'd post an example, but the only one I have is my own boarding pass, so that's not really an option.
The design is worse to me. Black background for reading is a bad idea, and there's a lot of things competing for attention because everything is so big. They could do with better font too... way too hard to read and thin.<p>White background + gotham font + white background + proper spacing + a splash of color = win
I really like the human text design, it's the only one that's a real improvement and easy to process.<p>I feel a lot of the others are swapping practicality for looking like an infrographic, prettier but just as difficult to process
This article is from 2010. The "designer"* loses credibility for not having a date on his blog post (at least the boarding cards have that).<p>*Using a bigger typeface is "design"?!
Boarding passes used to be on glossy cardstock with preprinted designs and lots of color. Now they're basically thermal printed on receipt paper because it's cheaper.<p>Depending on your airline and class of travel, sometimes you can still get a nice boarding pass.
Designer should understand that boarding pass at today, should no longer be designed, instead, software should be written to handle those things automatically.<p>The technology to automate boarding is already there and are very mature.