Final Project Process Book

Background and Motivation

The goal of this project is to enhance the travel planning experience for Delta Air Lines' frequent flyers by creating an interactive visualization of international flights operated by Delta in October. The motivation is to provide a user-friendly tool for members to efficiently redeem their points and select the most convenient flights based on location, time, and other specific preferences. Meanwhile, the available designed tools also allow user to explore how Delta airline operate international flights within 13 domestic airports in regard of flight fleet, date of week, issued date and end date.

Related Work

This project is inspired by various flight visualization tools and heat maps that showcase global flight patterns. Resources such as the 'FlightRadar24' website and academic papers on GIS (Geographic Information System) applications in aviation have informed our approach. Discussions in class about interactive data visualization have also played a pivotal role in shaping our design.

Questions

1. Where do international Delta flights depart from and arrive at?

2. What are the specific dates, times, and frequencies of these flights?

3. Which direct international routes are available?

Throughout the project, these questions evolved to consider the user experience and the visual representation of data. New questions included how to make the visualization more interactive and informative, such as incorporating a search function or showing flight details on hover.

Data

The data was sourced from Delta Air Lines' international flight schedule, available at Delta's official website Delta Cargo. The initial dataset was in an Excel format, containing information such as origin, destination, flight time, etc. This was cleaned and processed to enhance readability and utility.

Data Processing:

Initial visualizations included basic maps with plotted routes. Insights from these early visualizations indicated the need for a more interactive approach, leading to the adoption of GeoJSON for more sophisticated geographic representations.

• Grouping domestic airports have scheduled international flights
• Combining all the flights regardless of their final destination
• Supplementing the associated latitude and attitude for each airport
• Including the start date and end date for each flight
• Including Date of Week(DOW) for each flight schedule
• Calculating the amount of flights originated from each domestic airports

Design Evolution:

1. A global map highlighting routes between the selected country and America.

2. A design showing all routes from a chosen departure city.

3. A searchable bar allowing users to input departure and arrival cities to display corresponding routes.

The final design chosen was the third option, providing a balance between interactivity and information clarity while showing the direct flight on the heat map.

Implementation:

The interactive visualizations are grounded on a GeoJSON-powered global map, with search functionality allowing users to discover direct flight routes by entering departure and arrival cities. The map provides a comprehensive view of Delta's international routes, aiding travelers in efficient trip planning.

• A interactive map allow user to see the available flights
• A search bar allows user to explore flights after inputting origin or destination
• A query table displays all the flights from the origin or destination

User Testing:

• How intuitive did you find the navigation on our website?
• Do you find the features easy to implement? Was there any confusing tool?
• When interacting with the map on the left, do you find it useful to explore available international flights?
• Did you think the right chart useful for you to design what specific flight you desire?
• Do you encounter any technical issue while using the tools?
• Do you think the available tools make it sufficient to design your international trip with Delta?

Evaluation:

• We found that there are 13 domestic airports have international flights with Delta Airline, while Atlanta and New York have the most flights with respect to their status of travel hubs. Meanwhile, Boston, Seattle and Minneapolis also have dense flight schedule that we believe Delta Airline has design them to be new transit hub. Lastly, Delta airline operate most international flights with final destination to Europe.
• Through the interactive visualization, the user could navigate which desire flight they prefer by exploring on the left map, searching the available flights on the bar on the right, and select the suitable flight number. The user could also explore how Delta operate and the number of international flights within the States by exploring 13 airports on the search bar.
• Current visualization works well to satisfy the basic needs for users to explore available international flights. To further improve the user experience, we believe providing further information such as price and delay status could be useful if we acquired those information.