A Designer’s Take on Dragonpass
An app that aims to make the airport travelling experience enjoyable and pain-free should be enjoyable and pain-free to use, right?
The Background
DragonPass provides travellers with access to hundreds of airport lounges, dining offers and travel options to enhance the overall experience of travelling through an airport, whether you’re there for business or for leisure.
Established in 2005, it offers upgraded airport experiences via card access to over six million members with over 100 providers around the world, so it’s had time to bed in and grow into a useful and self-explanatory service.
Does It Work for Its Audience?
As I write, DragonPass has been available on the App Store for over four years and Google Play Store for nine months and it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been well received at all in either community.
Two seems to be the not-so-magic number when it comes to star ratings; 26 ratings on the App Store leave it with an average of two out of five, whilst 194 Android users have barely crept over the same mark. It’s experienced a similar hammering on apptrace, too.
The consensus is that people simply can’t get beyond the sign-up process for memberships. Multiple forced closings and awkwardly stuttering confirmation techniques have compelled many people to leave their first-ever reviews, such was their dissatisfaction.
DragonPass’ developers claim to be on hand to respond to user complaints and they have responded to the odd bad review, but they keep on coming thick and fast — it would appear to be a long to-do list. One Android user commented in May 2018: “Even two-year-old comments show that most of the original issues are not yet fixed…”. Says it all, perhaps?
It’s easy to see the value proposition of the app itself and the promise of a personalised experience based on your local airport (after allowing your location to be shared) is fulfilled to the extent of seeing the geographically appropriate offers. In a data-sensitive, post-GDPR era, though, it’s strange that they don’t explain why they need your location, but I guess that’s an easy fix.
The navigation is relatively clear and functional and it’s easy to find what you’re looking for, even if it isn’t easy to sign up for a membership to access some of them. The ‘Profile’ section feels like it contains almost too much information, some of which might be more at home in the main navigation.