Condiments at 30,000 feet

by Eric Reiss

Honestly, I wasn't drunk when I dumped the packet of sugar on my Chicken Salad Pasta. Nor when I dropped a "Refreshing towelette" in my coffee. No, I was struggling to differentiate between several nearly identical packages on my cramped dinner tray in the dusky gray light of a late afternoon flight.  

British Airways? "All-day Deli" is a simple boxed meal designed for short-hops, such as the 1-hour, 45-minute flight from London to Copenhagen. Aesthetically, everything is kept in white with thin, silver printing - a strange amalgam of America's "generic" designs of the 70s and the trendy minimalism of late-90s Europe. And the little packets are easy to confuse.  

The theory of scent
In the world of Web, "scent" means providing additional (usually visual) clues as to what something is or does. For example, on airplanes, salt and pepper are generally contained in two small envelopes, joined like Siamese twins along a shared perforated side.  

Now if one of the packets was gray and the other was white, given the surrounding context (a meal), it's probably fair to assume that most people would guess what was in them - even if "salt" and "pepper" wasn't prominently printed on the packet (which would otherwise eliminate the guesswork). In this case, the colors and environment combine to provide a very strong "scent" without any additional label.  

A strange correlation
Somehow, when it comes to salt and pepper, airlines are surprisingly bad at both labels and scent. Maybe this is also why so many of us hate airline food - the usability is bad, which detracts from the "user experience." More interestingly, I've discovered a strange correlation - this packaging often provides an indication of the airline's overall service quality.

Words fail me...

Lufthansa is more successful than most because gray is one of their company colors, which they've used to differentiate the two packages. Even though the printing on the yellow packet is virtually unreadable, it's easy to spot the words "Pfeffer / Pepper" on the gray half. Happily, this doesn't leave much room for doubt about what the other half contains. Of course, "reading between the lines" must come second nature to a company whose early airliners, Ju52s, were actually disguised bombers.    

Scandinavian Airlines was also inspired to use the company colors. Except that their colors are useless in terms of scent - blue and orange. And if that isn't confusing enough, the designers decided to get artsy-fartsy and NOT put clear, unambiguous labels on the packages. Instead, they wrote short, whimsical texts, such as: "The color of snow. The taste of tears. The enormity of oceans."  
Here's another creative alternative: "Imagine if the oceans of the world contained pepper instead of salt, well...maybe not."  

Personally, I think decoding these bits of pseudo-philosophical drivel is asking a lot of airline passengers whose native language is likely to be Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. And remember, although the designers came up with this dumb idea, the company approved it. Is it any surprise this airline is in serious financial trouble?    

British Airways decided that colors were unimportant. Instead, the labels are in five languages - dull, but reliable (just like the airline).                      

The Russian airline, Pulkova, doesn't even provide the luxury of translations. Actually, there were a lot of luxuries we had to forego on that flight.

Conclusion?
Well, it would be fun to design an airline dinner tray and its associated tools using some of the common-sense usability rules we apply to so many other daily tasks. It's actually surprising no one is doing this already (or at least doing it better).  

Under all circumstances, I think I've identified a key service metric that will grab the attention of airline executives the world over and make me a rich man. Or at least give me some frequent-flyer miles. Or an extra pillow. Or?    

Comments or questions?  

Update - March, 2004 As of March, 2004, British Airways has adopted the generic All-day Deli package for all of its meals. The new BA design ensures that the words are now unreadable in five languages.

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