Designing an Efficient TSA Security Kiosk Interface
Background
Peak travel season pushes TSA officers to their limits, manually verifying thousands of documents while ensuring security. What if there was a way to ease this burden? Learn how I designed the interface for NEC’s self-verification mobile kiosk that streamlines the verification process, enhancing security, and freeing up TSA resources.
HCD Methods
Personas > Journey Mapping > Object Mapping > Wire-framing > Usability Testing > UI Design
The Challenge
My role as a Sr. UX Designer was to bridge the gap between user needs, formulating a seamless design that made the passenger self-verification process effortless without TSO assistance.
Research
User Personas
Using secondary research and the Product Manager’s input, who was an SME, I crafted user personas to define target users and their needs (See Image A).
Image A - User Personas built from secondary research and SME input.
Current State Journey
In collaboration with the product manager, we outlined the 3-minute verification process (See Image B), where TSOs manually verified up to 80 passengers per shift. The repetitive nature of this task, especially during extended shifts and holidays, added cognitive strain and heightened security vulnerabilities.
Image B - Current stateCJM demonstrating the manual effort of TSOs.
Target State Journey
I designed a target Journey Map (See Image C) illustrating how NEC’s new mobile kiosk removes the need for TSOs to manually verify passenger identities. By integrating NEC’s #1 NIST-ranked facial recognition engine, we would close critical security gaps that come with human error.
Image C - Target state CJM showing the elimination of TSOs manual process.
Defining the Problem
With deep user insights, we crafted a problem statement that zeroed in on the core design challenge—ensuring a solution that truly benefits the users.
How might we design a kiosk user interface that verifies passenger at pre-boarding phase without TSO Assistance?
Ideation
Kiosk Screens
Designed with both passengers and TSOs in mind, the kiosk presented two separate displays. The design would be based on familiar UI elements provided by the PM (See Image D). This kept interactions intuitive, avoiding slowdowns and reducing additional workload for TSOs.
Image D - PM created guidance design based on the existing solutions.
User Flows
Before designs, I created a user flow expanding on the provide design mocks (See Image E). This served as reference to ensure the interface design moved users forward in the process.
Image E - User Flow demonstrating the passenger verification steps and failure flows.
Wire-framing
With an understanding of the expected screens, layout, and flow, I built low fidelity wireframes to facilitate communication (See Image F) with the lead engineer and the PM. This was instrumental in discussion on functionality, interactions, and capturing any usability concerns.
Image F - Low fidelity wireframes
Making it POP!
Derived from the TSA logo, I build the color palette that gave the UI a strong but sleek character (See Image G,H,I).
Image G - UI tone definition
Image H - Passenger self-verification interface designs.
Image I - TSA Offer hand-on interface designs.
Image J - TSA Offer hand-off monitoring designs.
Outcome & Results
The interface design was integrated in to the NEC kiosk (See Image H), resulting the automation of passenger verification. Additionally, TSOs could now manage three kiosks at once, cutting staffing requirements by a third, maintaining existing passenger verification rate, and closing security gaps caused by manual checks. See the breakdown below. ↓
Image H - Demo of the new kiosk design with the integrated UI.
Current TSA Resources Requirements
1 Kiosk : 1 TSO => 20 Verifications per Hour (est. 1 every 3 min)
1 TSA Checkpoint => 3 Kiosks : 3 TSOs => 60 Verifications per hour
15 TSA Checkpoints at DFW Int. Airport => 45 Kiosks : 45 TSOs => 900 Verifications per hour
New TSA Resources Requirements
3 Kiosk : 1 TSO => 20 Verifications per Hour (est. 1 every 3 min)
1 TSA Checkpoint => 3 Kiosks : 1 TSOs => 60 Verifications per hour
15 TSA Checkpoints at DFW Int. Airport => 45 Kiosks : 15 TSOs => 900 Verifications per hour