How Heathrow airport uses eye tracking to improve wayfinding in Terminal 5

Heathrow is using eye tracking technology to understand how passengers navigate Terminal 5 to enable them to make wayfinding easier and more efficient in the future.

Creating a seamless airport experience

Flying can be stressful. Checking in your luggage, passing through security, finding your gate; all this while managing to stay on time for your flight. There’s a lot to consider, so for the team at Heathrow, an airport that is easy to navigate and intuitive to passengers is a fundamental requirement for a stress-free airport experience. But it’s not just the passenger that benefits from intuitive airport wayfinding. With over 70 million passengers from over 140 different countries passing through Heathrow every year, maintaining a steady flow through the terminal is crucial to avoiding congestion and ensuring that flights depart on schedule.

Heathrow’s vision is to deliver the best airport service in the world and wayfinding is a key contributor to achieving this, so the business wanted powerful wayfinding insights, both to improve logistics, ease congestion and to continue making flying the best experience it can be for its passengers. This means ensuring airport terminals make sense to the people passing through them. But how do we find out what’s working and what isn’t? We often talk about the voice of the customer, but the view of the customer is equally important.  

The background - Understanding the passenger journey

At Heathrow, passengers embark on one of three core journeys: arriving, departing, or connecting. When landing, passengers are directed to the baggage reclaim and then to their onward transportation. When departing, they’re led to check-in, through security and to their gate. And when connecting, flyers are guided as quickly as possible to their next departing flight. For all three journeys, moving passengers as quickly as possible is paramount. Congestion in the terminal inevitably leads to a backlog, delays, and a lot of dissatisfied passengers. For one of the biggest and busiest airports in the world, effective wayfinding is a necessity.

The team at Heathrow Airport wanted to determine what was and wasn’t working on each of the three core journeys. This involved precisely locating the moments in which passengers hesitate, get confused or get lost, as well as the areas that are most susceptible to bottlenecks occurring. Only so many insights can be attained by observing travelers or offering questionnaires in isolation; to really understand how people navigate the airport, Heathrow decided to use eye tracking technology in combination with qualitative depth interviews.

The method - Combining eye tracking observations and interviews

Heathrow Airport partnered with Tobii in order to answer their critical wayfinding questions. To understand their customer’s perspective when navigating Terminal 5, the research team decided to use Tobii’s wearable eye tracker Tobii Pro Glasses 3. These eye tracking glasses tracked passengers’ gaze as they completed one of the 3 core journeys within the terminal. Whether they were finding their gate, looking for the elevators, or searching for the correct lane at passport control, their gaze was tracked and stored by the glasses.

The partnership with Tobii Insight Services meant that eye tracking experts worked with Heathrow’s in-house team to provide qualitative context to the eye movements and attention patterns of the participants. At the airport, passengers were recruited to participate in the study. 108 participants had their attention tracked while covering different parts of the passenger journey, whether departing, arriving, or connecting. The research team followed the participants while viewing their gaze in real-time, making notes that would then be used to conduct a follow-up depth interview centered around key moments.

Working together, the project team was able to locate key moments of decision or hesitation. These moments generally occurred at transitional points on their journey: entering a large hall, stepping off an escalator, or encountering several exit options and potential paths. Attention data in these few seconds were crucial to understanding what was causing confusion, what signage helped resolve the hesitation, and whether informative signage was going unnoticed. It also helped the researchers see where oversaturation of signage was causing high cognitive load and additional confusion.  

Physical eye tracking is always only half the story. Equipped with participants’ recordings, the project team showed passengers their movements and gaze patterns after the fact. Attention is implicit and often subconscious, but when participants are able to visualize how their attention moves, they have the opportunity to process the reasoning behind it. By interviewing participants after the study, using recordings of their gaze, it was possible to gather rich qualitative insights that gave meaning to the eye tracking data.  

In this eye tracking study, the project team got a fresh perspective on how passengers navigate toward their outward transport option. Having had previous trouble directing passengers to the correct elevators, the Heathrow team used eye tracking to analyze the visibility of the signage. Seeing how participants struggled with the information presented, the Heathrow team is now well-equipped to optimize signage and prevent frustrating endings to long journeys!  

Going forward - Optimizing other terminals 

Heathrow is constantly focused on improving the user experience at its airport. That’s why the team are already looking forward to analyzing the other terminals. Each terminal at Heathrow is different, with unique journeys and unforeseen blockers and bottlenecks. The team at Heathrow is now set up to conduct more eye tracking studies and improve the passenger experience for the better.