How data can save you time in airport security... A True Story
The Story
Picture this for some reason you have booked an 8 am flight. Like a good, obedient traveler you follow the rules and attempt to arrive at the airport 2 – 3 hours before boarding time. Well 3 hours if you listen to your alarm, 2 hours if you decide to ignore it.
You wake up that morning a bit late, because you lost the internal battle to stay awake till 4:30, like you thought you would so you could catch up on sleep on the flight, but that’s okay because you made backup plans to take a taxi instead of the train to get to their airport on time. Except it turns out that you and the rest of London were all battling with your inner sleep demons. So, what should have been a clear cruise to the airport ends up being, peak 5:30 am traffic! Where are people going at 5:30 in the morning on a Wednesday!?
By some miracle, you made it to the airport, but your 2 – 3 hours had turned into 1 and a half hours before the flight. You can feel the pit in your stomach, a sort of nihilistic optimism settles in your spirit as you race through self-check (thank the Lord you decided to check in online). The queue has been skipped, the bag has been dropped, and your last remaining barrier could make or break your passageway to your gate. There is the North side Security to your left and the South side to your right…which way do you go??
Data in the Wild!
Welcome to this data series called Data in the Wild!!! It’s a pleasure to be writing on this platform to speak to a like-minded audience whose answer to the question, how does this work? I wonder if I can make a data viz about that?
When I speak in the wilderness about data viz one of the top questions I get is, that sounds cool but how exactly could I use that? More than half the time, when people think of DataViz they think about dashboards, and optimizations…which is part of the pie but ignore the rest of it. There is data behind the uses of DataViz. In this series, I’ll be talking about data in the wild. Everyday uses of DataViz in the world that you may or may not have thought of. It should be fun.
Data Viz Saves The Day
In this installation I’m talking about data being used in the airport. When I traveled to New York earlier in January, to help Andy deliver one of his amazing workshops for a client. The story above, I’m sorry to say, was true retelling of my experience. Except for the backup taxi, in my case that was a back up train, where I used Uber to skip a section of the train journey…it was stressful to say the least.
And as I was caught between a rock and a hard place, I looked up to the Heathrow heavens to have DataViz save me. A simple visualization showing the level of congestion in each security line. The North was 5 people long, whilst the south was 2 people long. That decision had me breeze through security and make it to may my gate as they were calling my boarding group.
It’s an example of how DataViz can be used in 2 ways, 1 as a communication tool to a target audience for them to quickly and easily digest content and gain an understanding (this side is busy please go that way). And second as an automated tool to support services, sensors are able to pick up the people traffic as data and the graphic means that with or without orders the wardens are able to redirect people to where they can have an easy customer experience.
I hope that helped widen your perspective on the use cases of DataViz, and speak next time we see data in the wild