Designing Ryanair’s Boarding Pass | Hacker News Reader

Designing Ryanair’s Boarding Pass

medium.com

93 pointsplurby52 comments

I always assumed that Ryan Air's design follows a deliberate dark pattern so as to maximise the likelihood you will end up paying for a missed flight / wrong baggage size etc.

A couple of dark patterns stopped with their latest website design, it's real pleasant compared to what booking looked liked 5 years ago (We booked a Ryanair flight just an hour ago.)

They still don't save passport details, so flying outside Schengen with them is still a pain. Particularly 'transfers' through the UK.

What do you mean by this? How should the passport details be saved? I always enter the details when buying flights outside Schengen area, and this far haven't found it painful in any way.

Ryanair officially doesn't provide transfers and neither does any other budget airline in Europe. Strictly speaking, that's the definition of the budget airline.

Its not enough that Ryan Air have cheap prices, they must also "feel" like a budget carrier. Unfortunately abuse of passengers is part of this. The abuse can be seen as a confirmation the customer really got the lowest price possible for their flight.

It also has another side-effect: Most passengers don't have serious problems. But they are expecting at least some hassle and discomfort so for the majority of flights they are under-promising and over delivering. A more respectable airliner couldn't compete with them in this way, customers expect better of them.

It always feels like there’s an element of marketting to this too. I think it reinforces not just budget, but out-right cheap. Uncompromisingly cheap.

I would not be surprised if you could find americans who have never set foot outside of north america, who could still name ryanair as being the cheap option here. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they couldn’t name a second. (not to assault the stereotype too much, just to single out a demographic who have never had any need to put one second of research into the topic.)

All the headline grabbing “charging for toilets” nonsense is really effective, free marketting.

I read the title and immediately thought "oh no, not again" thinking this was yet another "portfolio redesign".

Thankfully it's actually a redesign by Ryanair itself. Whenever I have a paper boarding pass I always fold it into my password so this is a great improvement.

>Whenever I have a paper boarding pass I always fold it into my password

Great idea, that way you can have your password manager take care of the boarding and you don't have to worry about it at all!

>Whenever I have a paper boarding pass I always fold it into my password so this is a great improvement.

I'm unclear about what you mean. Would you mind to clarify, please?

Edit: What HN users choose to downvote sometimes bewilders me...

    s/password/passport

I am curious if this syntax is valid in anything other than Perl? (Though even that would need a trailing slash).

Right, forgetting about the trailing slash is similar to forgetting about the semicolon ;), thank you for pointing that out. Besides Perl, it should also work with sed, I don't know about anything else.

I miss coding in Perl....

I think he/she meant: "I always fold it into my passport"

A very nice improvement over the old boarding pass. The information is laid out much more clearly and seems more easy to scan.

The only minor change I'd consider is having a black-and-white version of the pass without large solid blocks of colour (for example, by using line icons for graphics instead). This would save a lttle bit on printer ink.

You could just print it in black in white. None of the colors convey important information.

The solid blocks of colour will still be printed as solid blocks of black or grey wasting a small bit of printer ink :-)

Or for those of us who only have a B&W laser printer at home (common in offices too!)

The new design seems to make sense, but I'm somewhat skeptical these are all their own ideas.

They have an odd history of straight up copying ideas, sometimes verbatim...to the point where it's embarrassing.[1]

[1] http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/pr...

Edit: Yep. That clever boarding pass where you fold it in fours...Virgin America, back in 2014. https://mtc.cdn.vine.co/r/videos/87CD50B8DF10701528930526248...

Edit 2: In retrospect, I suppose this sounds pretty harsh. The connotation of "Labs", "Research", "Design", etc just sticks in my craw...especially when paired with what's basically a copy of another airline's idea, rolled out with operational testing that didn't involve the actual operational groups.

Well it's not art, it's a boarding pass. They ought to be reusing ideas whenever possible.

Inspiration, sure. The copy of Southwest's Ding! was funny though, as they literally copied the text that referred to partnerships with ATA.

The Virgin America boarding pass is credited in the article

The article explicitly credits the source of the folding design to Virgin and Vueling

> Two airlines that stood out were Virgin America and Vueling with their foldable boarding passes. This folding concept became more intriguing following some research conducted at Dublin Airport.

I find it interesting that if you fold the pass according to the instructions, you get the core pass on the front and the ads on the back, while if you do the opposite, you get the core pass on the front and the schedule on the back.

Regardless of the instructions, I think that's the way most people would fold it into quarters. Notice that they rearranged the sections from the first wireframe to the final version; the same folding steps would have hidden the ads in the first version.

Indeed, that is the worst change from the original draft to the final version in my opinion. It puts Ryanairs wants over the passengers needs, clearly. because as a passenger I just don't care for the ad, but the travel plan is a really great idea and will probably be unused by most passengers...

They noted fairly explicitly that ads were a business requirement, so that was a noticeable but utterly unsurprising change. I noted two important things though:

* there is still less ad-space on the new boarding pass than on the old one

* the final version can still be folded such that you get the pass on one side and the trip information on the other

If that got the marketroids to sign off on it, it seems like a pretty damn good compromise. The ryanair experience is one of ads, hidden charges and upselling either way.

"A large part of Ryanair’s revenue is generated by ancillary income, so allowing for ad space was an important business requirement."

They seem to care so much about their ad space, that I wonder if I can edit the boarding pass, remove the ads before printing it and still board my plane. How long before they start aggressively promoting stuff in the cabin for the whole duration of the trip?

>How long before they start aggressively promoting stuff in the cabin for the whole duration of the trip?

I have only taken Ryanair once, and it was like being in a flying macdonalds. The back of every seat was covered in ads.

I do exactly this, I place "white blocks" over all the parts that aren't important, 3/4 of the document isn't, before printing the boarding pass to not waste ink.

Do you have a very time and effort efficient way to do that? I can't see how that would be a good use of time if it takes more than 30 seconds or so...

I think it would be under 30 seconds if photoshop is already open.

I just use Preview.app.

I've never had a problem just printing the pass part, though I generally use their app now.

Some trivia: Ryanair are not IATA members but discovered that organization had issued them a code of FR, for internal use. Ryanair just started using it on boarding passes and flight information systems and save themselves thousands in IATA membership fees!

Easyjet aren't members either but instead use their catchy ICAO code EZY. Their philosophy being that if an airport wants their custom they can damn well upgrade their system to handle three-character codes.

Easyjet has an IATA code of U2; you're right that they're not a member either, I assume they got their code the same way :)

> "How long before they start aggressively promoting stuff in the cabin for the whole duration of the trip?"

But they do, in the form of seat-back adverts, "duty free" offerings and their scratchcards. All of which can be quite easily ignored by sticking on a pair of noise cancelling headphones and firing up my Kindle, which is standard procedure for every flight anyway, no matter what the airline.

I've never flown with an American company, but I have flown quite a bit with a few here in Europe, particularly Norwegian and they use a digital boarding pass that I add to the Wallet app on my iPhone. It's super convenient and really nice.

Digital boarding passes are the standard in America now too, but airlines offer paper back-ups for those that don't have compatible phones or in the case of technical difficulties.

"The standard" ... where do you fly out of? I fly out of BOS (roughly twice a month) and I'd estimate 1 person in 50 uses a phone.

I like paper boarding passes because I'm sure as hell not handing a TSA agent my unlocked phone.

What are the problems with the new design from operational staffs perspective?

The article ends by saying they wished they had taken operational staffs opinion into account, but there are no examples with things this does worse than the old.

Ads on the boarding pass. That's so Ryanair.

Looks similar to a paper version of a United Mobile boarding pass: http://pointsmilesandmartinis.boardingarea.com/wp-content/up...

Still, an improvement... I always assumed the form factor was driven by the ticket printers installed for the airport gate agents.

IME boarding passes for Ryanair printed at the airport are printed on traditional airline card stock (and usually by contractors, not Ryanair proper), based on a 'standard' design.

Ryanair wants the primary boarding pass to be one that everyone brings with them. In that case they have a lot more flexibility. So long as they use a PDF-417 code and it fits into one of those little barcode scanners they could design it pretty much any way they wanted.

I flew Ryanair a couple of weeks ago, without having been aware of the boarding pass re-design.

I saw immediately that it was meant to be folded into quarters. Neat, I thought. Then I found myself referring to each section at various times, and actually finding the information really useful.

It's great to be pleasantly surprised by well-considered design.

Complete fail. Ryanair first, customer last as per usual. Why do they make their customer print advertisements? Have they done anything to reduce the amount of ink required?

How is this a failure? The old boarding pass contained advertisements too, and actually much more of them. The requirement for ads was clearly addressed in the article:

  Section 4: Promotional space
  
  A large part of Ryanair’s revenue is generated by
  ancillary income, so allowing for ad space was an
  important business requirement.

So that's that. It's income, and part of keeping the costs down. I don't mind as long as I can hide them by folding the paper.

Because that's how RyanAir can afford to chafe their customers cheaper prices than many other airlines. Every ad you remove is an increase in the price of the airfare. Passengers on a budget airline are generally likely to make the trade for lower prices.

> If you forgot to print your own boarding pass you’d incur a hefty fee for the convenience of Ryanair printing it for you.

Yes that happened to me. Worst flight check-in user-experience ever.

Wait: back up a little. RyanAir has "labs" ?!???

I imagine they need a lab do do all the experimenting required to find the exact treshold of pain for airline passengers. Test protocols must look like

Test 101: 4.30 am landing at airport in neighboring country to destination. Unhappiness 24% recommendation: YES.

Test 102: Non-parent passengers laps sold as seats for random children. Unhappiness 54% recommendation: YES.

Test 103: Electric cattle prod boarding: Boarding speedup 112% Unhappiness 92% recommendation: NO.

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