About

Jetfuel is a service that facilitates food ordering and delivery directly to your gate from a wealth of restaurants at your international airport. Jetfuel was created as part of a Product Management and UX Design challenge to create an app that would easily facilitate food ordering and delivery at LAX airport.

Challenge

My objective on the Jetfuel project was to design and scope an experience where travelers can order food from restaurants at an international airport. I was tasked with conducting user and market research, crafting wireframes and userflows, and creating a clickable, fully interactive prototype.

Solution

The first part of my design process included user research. I conducted a short survey in which 13 jetsetters were asked about their experiences ordering food at airports. Here are some of the insights that were gleaned from the survey:

The participants also helped uncover the following pain points with air travel:

• Feeling rushed 😓
• Waiting in line 🕒
• Finding quality food 🍔
• Gate changes 🏃
• Delays and cancellations 🤬

Market Research

The food ordering and delivery market is currently valued at over $110B. However there are surprisingly few existing solutions in the airport restaurant space: only 2-3 major applications or services at the time of research that were rolled out in limited airports.

~$600M

Estimated food and
beverage revenue
of domestic airports
in 2013

Despite the market size for food and beverage revenue, many food delivery apps were not specializing in airport terminal delivery, and those that did lacked key ratings and review features, or were only available in limited airports.

Wireframing + Prototyping

After uncovering the pain points with food ordering and air travel, I was able to complete a quick branding and wireframing exercise. I landed on the name Jetfuel: a play on the idiom of 'fueling up' before a trip, and a name that was evocative of speed, while also playing into the airport theme.

Results

The final result was a clickable prototype that addressed the main pain points of air travel and ordering food. Upon reviewing the prototype, the feedback was largely positive. 96% of survey participants felt that the app would help greatly alleviate some of the pain points of air travel and more easily enable them to order food on a limited time budget.

• We addressed the pain point of feeling rushed by allowing users to order ahead of time. Strategically, we also thought to optimize time by placing QR codes to the ordering app at security checkpoints.
• We alleviated the pain point of waiting in line by allowing users to deliver food directly to their gate or lounge.
• We addressed the pain point of finding quality food by enabling ratings and reviews
• We tackled gate changes and delays by allowing users to sync their flight information and location with the app, allowing couriers to deliver directly to the customer at their destination.

Conclusion

Jetfuel was a fun and challenging product and design exercise. If allotted more time, I also would have liked to define and scope the courier app and restaurant-facing applications. I was especially interested in what the restaurant ordering application might look like, and how I could leverage my knowledge of hardware and printing applications to seamlessly integrate into the food preparation and delivery experiences.

Overall, the exercise was a success: I addressed the main pain points with air travel, and proved that there was a decently sized unserved market in air travel and food delivery. Since completing this challenge, I have noticed that existing food delivery services have expanded into airports, however AtYourGate remains one of the only dedicated services for the airport food delivery experience and it is only available at 17 airports throughout the country, meaning there is still a lot of room for competitors to enter the market.