I spent a few days this week in Seattle attending a private Microsoft conference about engineering best practices. Being a Microsoft employee not based in Puget Sound, I’ve traveled to Seattle several times in the past couple of years so I’m somewhat familiar with SeaTac. The past couple of times I’ve been to Seattle, there has been a major construction project at the airport and both times (in March and this afternoon) I’ve made errors while trying to return my rental car. It’s frustrating when you make an error, but it’s even more frustrating when a system isn’t designed to help you gracefully recover from the error.
Last March, when I tried to return my rental car, I saw the “rental car return” sign a few moments too late and couldn’t actually turn into the “rental car plaza” (I believe that’s what the fine folks in Seattle refer to the rental car garage). Instead, I followed a cab to the lower level of the garage where the cabies and shuttles pull in to pick up passengers. When I made that mistake, I ended up having to circle around the terminal a second time in order to enter the correct entry to the garage. This experience was frustrating and it added a few extra minutes to my airport commute. Recovering from this error wasn’t exactly graceful but at least the system allowed me to recover from the error. It still seems ridiculous to me that there wasn’t a clear way to get to the level of the garage designated for returning rental cars from the commercial vehicles level.
This afternoon, my error was more drastic and recovering from it (using the airport’s system) was essentially impossible. I’m not sure which entrance to SeaTac I had used this afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t the one I’ve used in the past (I needed to pump gas and used GPS to guide me to a nearby gas station and then to the airport). I correctly followed the signs marked rental car return so that I was in the right lane and not the left lane, which was marked freeways. At one point, a series of orange cones marked an exit - but an exit to what I wasn’t sure. And since nobody was entering that exit, I just followed the rest of traffic straight ahead. A moment too late I realized that the unmarked exit with the orange cones was where I was supposed to be heading to return my rental car. I tried not to panic because I figured like most airports, there’s probably a way to go around the terminal and come back to where I needed to go. Unfortunately, that was not the case today. At that point, my only option was exiting to one of two freeways. This option wouldn’t have been so bad except that the freeway I chose was a parking lot (due to further construction on the freeway). Getting off at the next exit, getting on the freeway in the opposite direction, and finally getting to the airport and correctly entering the rental car return part of the garage added an extra 30 minutes to my airport commute. I find that extremely unacceptable.
In both of these situations, the designers of the airport seem to assume that travelers won’t be making any mistakes. In any situation, that assumption is ridiculous, and it is even more ridiculous in the case of travel. Observing people at airports, they tend to be overwhelmed, short on time, and confused. Designing a system for any user (especially this set) and not accounting for errors is poor user experience. I realize that the airport is undergoing a construction project, but even a temporary design should minimize errors and offer users a way to recover from errors.