This is the second year in a row that I’ve visited Italy for a day. Last year, I spent 24 hours in Milan for Doja Cat’s concert. Last week, I decided to join my friend from New York who had a long layover in Rome.
Italy resembles Albania, where I grew up, and I have a fondness for the country whose language I learned before I picked up English, just by watching Dragon Ball on the Italian TV channel for hours.
The experience at Bergamo airport last year wasn’t nearly as positive as the rest of the trip in Milan, characterized by long waiting times, unorganized queues, and frustrated staff. I distinctly remember an officer being extremely mean-spirited to a person who was rushing across the airport so as not to miss his transatlantic flight.
80% of all travel conflicts take place within an airport.
Traveling is fun, but also stressful for many people, and airports are the culmination of the preparation for a trip’s start or end. 80% of all travel conflicts take place within an airport, according to my non-scientific, unreplicable calculations.
An airport pulsates with emotion and intense anticipation, making it a place uniquely positioned to generate reactions. Every reaction is amplified at the airport, making it ideal study material for business and user experience professionals.
Something I’ve previously discussed in a technical context with clients came to my attention in an airport setting.
This article highlights how an everyday life observation may impact businesses and how to use it to improve customer experience.
My friend who was arriving from New York experienced delays. Remembering last year’s negative experience in Milan, I went to one of my favorite places online: Google Maps reviews.
Similar to other airports worldwide, the Fiumicino airport in Rome receives a myriad of feedback from its users, the travelers visiting or returning home. As of the date of writing, it has over 50,000 user reviews on Google Maps. The Bergamo airport has over 30,000 reviews.
There are three main ways to filter review information on businesses’ Google pages:
- Searching for a term
- Sorting by relevancy, recency, or score
- Commonly mentioned terms
I prioritize reading the lowest-rated reviews first. This sorting behavior is common among consumers considering that:
Sorting reviews by the lowest rating paints a more accurate picture of the way a business treats its customers than the default sorting. I’ve seen 1-star reviews on Booking.com that I found unreasonable, like complaints about the weather or being charged for early departures, which nonetheless helped me make a decision. Dealbreakers are inherently personal.
While information in digital interfaces can be sorted in multiple creative ways, and the ways users interact with sorting filters are also worth exploring in a separate article, the review replies were what drew my attention.
I identified an issue related to information architecture within the reviews.
These were some of the replies the airport was giving to users:
- Good evening, thanks for reporting. It is very important to know the experience of passengers in order to improve our services, for this reason we kindly invite you to fill in the form at the link https://www.adr.it/web/aeroporti-di-roma-en/suggestions-and-complaints section ‘Please fill your claim form ‘’ and provide us with all relevant information. Thank you for your cooperation.
- Good morning Micheal, we pay the utmost attention to our passengers and want them to feel welcome at all times: it is the spirit of our airport, our staff and everyone who works here. For this reason we would like to know in detail what happened to you, we therefore kindly ask you to fill out the online form at the following link https://www.adr.it/web/aeroporti-di-roma-en/suggestions-and-complaints providing us with more details about what happened. We thank you for your cooperation.
Here you have this trove of user feedback, even grouped by term mention frequency (we did not like the piano), and what was the airport doing with these 50000 people? Giving them extra homework.
Information architecture goal: Meeting people where they’re at (identifying the path of least resistance for a user to complete a task while being a feasible solution for the business)
Issue: The airport wasn’t providing a straightforward and user-friendly approach to accomplish the task of leaving a review; rather, it was creating friction by adding the seemingly unnecessary step of the form.
Everyday life application of the path of least resistance in information architecture: If a user hasn’t provided enough details, the form is an effective way to request additional info. Updating the review would be the path of least resistance for the user, but this would likely be difficult to manage from a technical standpoint for airport staff.
For users who had already written a detailed review, the airport could create an auto-tagging system that would categorize the reviews accordingly based on departmental goals, which would result in a simple way for users to provide feedback in an app they already open every few days, less overhead for the team, and issues being addressed more promptly.
70% of unhappy customers return to your business if their issue was resolved quickly and efficiently. It’s easier to reach our goals if we meet people where they’re at, and identifying the path of least resistance is one of the ways we can improve customer experience.
Grazie Roma for the inspiration for this article 🇮🇹
Related posts: The path of least resistance
AI Policy: I personally write each draft and final copy on this website. All content reflects my own thinking, ideas, style, and craft. I do not use AI such as ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate articles. Occasionally, I ask AI (such as Formalizer or Equativ) to summarize or re-state my own ideas and may restructure sections based on the response.
Leave a Reply