The History of Ryanair’s Boarding Pass

The humble boarding pass, up until the mid 2000’s was just a simple document to get you from the check-in desk to your airplane seat. Gate Number? Check. Seat Number? Check. Ample time to peruse the shops and sip a fine Italian macchiato while you waited for flight number to be called.

Old Boarding Pass

Fast forward to 2005 and Irish airline Ryanair decide to change the landscape of how you board your flight. Eager to change the customer behaviour of queuing at check-in desks to have boarding passes printed, they allowed customers to check-in online, print their own boarding pass and make their way to the gate thus bypassing all those nasty queues.

The reason? Board planes quicker, faster turnaround at airports, cut operation costs and run more flights per day. The catch? If you forgot to print your own boarding pass you’d incur a hefty fee for the convenience of Ryanair printing it for you.

What was once a simple piece of paper became an invaluable currency capable of inducing mountainous volumes of stress for already jittery travellers.

Any designer worth their salt should jump at the chance to redesign a boarding pass. A quick dribbble search and you’ll see hundreds of mocked up boarding passes for both screen and print. Dig a little deeper and you will see how many leave out the details that are necessary for both customers and flight operations. This isn’t a criticism of any of those mockups, what we want to highlight is the vast chasm of difference between a visual concept and a living design that needs to satisfy both business requirements and user needs.

In the following article we’ll outline the beginnings of the project, some of the challenges we encountered and ultimately what we learned from the process of redesigning Ryanair’s boarding pass.

The Beginning

To start we need to go back to the beginning of how this project came about. In 2014 Ryanair launched ‘Digital Labs’. The goal of which is to bring the airline into the 21st century by hiring a team of dedicated engineers, designers and product owners. The primary focus of the early stages of the team was to re-engineer the existing website into a travel platform that would both cater for the increased customer demand and scale with business expectations.

Starting the Project

During the design of our new platform, we were tasked with designing check-in. There was no scope for redesigning the paper boarding pass, but we felt it warranted the same level of design consideration. Compared with both our competitors and our own mobile app boarding pass, we felt it contained too much information with poor hierarchy.

We could have easily disregarded investing time into the paper boarding pass with the launch of our mobile app version. However, paper is not quite dead yet with many of our passengers still relying on it, if only for a physical backup.

Rethinking this iconic document felt within our reach, so bursting with excitement and a touch of naivety, we went to seek out a few stakeholders who had the down-low on the boarding pass. Hooray! Everyone seemed up for change. We questioned the necessity of every single item on the existing pass. These early conversations with the stakeholders were positive with very few blockers, however we lacked detail on the scale of changes we were about to make.

The Research

With everyone onboard, we launched into the next phase; research. As referenced earlier, there are plenty of redesigns of boarding passes but the majority of these are UI mockups to showcase a designer’s skill-set. We needed more concrete examples of boarding passes that were out in the wild.

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. We observed that a sizeable number of people did in fact fold their boarding pass into quarters so they could insert it into their Passport.

Enthused with possibilities, we got a bunch of designers into a room for a quick sketching session. In a very short space of time we had a couple of new boarding pass layouts that had a better information hierarchy, used less aviation jargon and contained a passenger travel plan for the flight in question.

Below you can see an early wireframe concept for the boarding pass, designed for the user behaviour of folding that A4 piece of paper into quarters.