A better UX for in-flight entertainment

2024/08/24 #uiux

This summer I had to spend way too much time on several long-haul flights due to several reasons not entirely in my control. As a consequence, I got to try out several different in-flight entertainment offerings by the various different airlines I got to fly with (Emirates, Turkish Airlines & Lufthansa).

This post is to report that not a single of those in-flight entertainment systems offered a satisfying or even acceptable user experience. Touchscreens were slow to respond, menus were laid out in a completely irrational way, settings were hidden behind unnecessarily creative icon designs, unskippable ads interrupted the experience all the time, the list goes on...

It does not have to be that bad

I want to suggest this short list of basic things that any designer of an in-flight entertainment system should keep in mind in order to at least get the basics somewhat right:

It all starts with a responsive touch screen (come on people, it's 2024!)
Don‘t offer a 3D-map of the flight route if the system's processor can‘t handle rendering it (but also, it's 2024 people!)
Let me connect my own bluetooth headphones instead of handing out millions of those throwaway headphones every year
Changing the brightness, the volume and turning off the screen should always be just one touch away
The screen should turn off automatically if no one interacts with it (I can't tell you how often I've witnessed the screen of an empty seat lighting up the cabin for an entire flight...)

Or does it?

You see, my standards are actually really low but so far I have not seen a single in-flight entertainment system get all of this right. I understand that designing and maintaining a good in-flight entertainment system is not an easy challenge. Planes and commercial flight specifically is a tightly regulated environment and comes with a variety of technical and legal limitations that need to be considered, accommodated and worked around.

Silicon Valley to the rescue!?

In a way I am a bit surprised that neither Google nor Apple seem to have gotten directly involved in this space yet. When it comes to Apple, it's not like they are totally ignoring in-flight entertainment. There are actually some airlines offering Apple TV+ content on their flights. This however, just seems to be one aspect of Apple's general push to bring Apple TV+ to more platforms such as smart TVs and is not an attempt to control the user experience of those platforms. It must be a lucrative business and would seem like a natural extension of Android TV/Apple TV or maybe even Android Auto / Apple's CarPlay (those don't do video though so maybe not).

Probably not...

With Apple's new VR headset "Apple Vision Pro" one of the use cases most often cited both by Apple itself but also the few actual Vision Pro users is using it on a plane. It seems like the window of opportunity for an alternative timeline of good & standardized in-flight entertainment might just have closed for good.