Redesigning a Hub Departure Lobby
How a hub lobby produces throughput through co‑creation with travelers —
and where ORD's environment makes that participation harder than it needs to be.
Role
Research lead, Customer Strategy & Innovation
Designed and led mixed-methods field study
Partners
Lobby team
Architecture & facilities planning
Airport operations
Scope
Current-state evaluation of the ORD departure lobby
Inputs to the 2027 ORD rebuild
Summary
Problem
Design
Insight
Impact
266K+
travelers passing through ORD on a single peak day in July 2025.
Summary
Airport departure lobbies are transitional spaces that must absorb rising volumes within fixed footprints. As travel demand grows, hub carriers must rethink these spaces faster than they can rebuild them. I led research on one such effort at O'Hare to understand how to increase throughput and self-service without adding agents or square footage. Combining day-of-travel app data, operational data, and in-situ observation, the work documented how lobby congestion is created upstream. Uneven inflow concentrates travelers at the economy/security core; spillover lines and ride-hailing cross-traffic amplify clustering and suppress use of nearby stations; inconsistent or unclear signage raises interpretation cost when load is highest, and travelers default to visible queues — shifting work back to agents and undermining self-service. The work reframed lobby throughput as a coordination problem rather than a capacity problem, and produced a set of evaluation principles now used as a shared reference across the 2027 rebuild.
+6.4%
year-over-year growth in ORD passenger volume through mid-2025.
9 of 10
busiest TSA screening days in ORD history occurred in summer 2025.
Sources: Hilton 2024 Trends Survey; Sensor Tower, State of Mobile 2025; Expedia 2024 Air Travel Hacks Report.
Problem
Air travel is entering a period defined by higher passenger volumes, tighter operational margins, and rising expectations for clarity and self-service — especially at hub airports, where small frictions compound quickly into systemwide delays.
For a hub departure lobby, that means supporting greater volume with clearer service segmentation, stronger self-service, and more reliable throughput — without relying on proportional increases in staffing or footprint. ORD was selected as a priority hub for this redesign work. It presented a rare opportunity to step back from incremental fixes and examine foundational elements of the day-of-travel experience — elements that are difficult to change at scale once built.
To guide the evaluation, the Lobby team articulated a set of core principles — translating United Next priorities into concrete criteria for how traffic should enter, distribute, and progress through the space:
Forward — clear entry points and pathways that support continuous forward movement without backtracking.
Distributed — services and pathways segmented to balance demand across the lobby and support different customer needs, including accessibility and privacy.
Consistent — clarity through uniform signage, naming, and sequencing within ORD and across airports where possible.
Flexible — layouts and service positioning that can adapt to short-term operational needs and remain durable over time.
Self‑service — expanded effective use of mobile and kiosk tools while minimizing non-value-add behaviors and unnecessary agent interactions.
Research was scoped to evaluate the current-state lobby against these principles from a customer-experience perspective: where the existing environment supported the intended mode, and where it fell short. The work was anchored in one central concern — whether the lobby's design makes the intended flow legible and workable for customers in real time. In security-adjacent, time-pressured contexts, travelers must act quickly with limited deliberation. When the environment clearly supports the intended pathways, traffic distributes as designed and throughput is sustained. When it does not, travelers hesitate, backtrack, or concentrate in ways that undermine the system's performance.
Design
The study combined four elements over a multi-week period.
Quantitative analysis of digital and operational data — day-of-travel app usage (especially check-in and checked bags), traffic volumes across lobby entry points, kiosk and bag-drop utilization across the lobby, and security throughput across checkpoints — used to establish where demand concentrated, where capacity went underused, and how patterns varied by location and touchpoint.
On-site behavioral observation — focused on entry-point choice, initial orientation, navigation, backtracking, queuing, and social herding — to document how travelers actually committed to pathways under time pressure, particularly near kiosks, bag drop, and security.
Evaluation of lobby layout and service organization — examining how entry points, signage, the placement and orientation of kiosks and counters, security checkpoint positioning, and circulation paths influenced movement patterns and traffic distribution.
Literature review — spanning customer experience, self-service adoption, service design, the social psychology of uncertainty and social proof in high-pressure settings, and the anthropology of transitory "non-places" (e.g., Marc Augé) — used to contextualize observed behavior and strengthen interpretation without relying on speculation.
The design choice that mattered most was treating the lobby as a system, not a collection of features. Optimizing individual elements — a sign, a kiosk row, a checkpoint label — in isolation would have produced point fixes that fail to address how traffic actually forms. Instead, the four inputs were used in combination to evaluate the current-state lobby against the Lobby team's principles, and to frame three structural insights about where the environment supported or undermined intended flow.
Insight
Three patterns emerged across the diary entries and follow-up interviews. Each one shifted how the airline app sits across the day of travel.
Lobby throughput is co-created — the airline shapes conditions, travelers complete the system, and work shifts back when the two sides aren't aligned.
Inflow geography concentrates traffic at the economy/security core; stations off the main path go underused regardless of capacity.
Signage and station design break down under load — travelers default to visible queues, and work shifts back to agents.
1. Lobby Throughput Is Co-Created
Airports have sometimes been treated as textbook "non-places" — transient environments organized around circulation and compliance rather than identity or relationship. The standard reading frames this as a tension between efficiency and depersonalization.
The broader research landscape complicates that reading. Social and environmental psychology suggest less a dynamic of alienation than a tacit agreement about autonomy under constraint. When travelers enter the lobby, they effectively consent to strict behavioral constraints in exchange for an environment that reduces functional decisions. They trade one kind of freedom (open-ended choice) for another: freedom from functional choice, so they can move confidently and direct their attention toward more discretionary aims — food, purchases, comfort, time.
This dynamic is not "customer behavior" layered on top of infrastructure. Lobby throughput is a value co-creation ecosystem: the airline shapes conditions through layout, signage, tool placement, and service design, while travelers complete the system through attention, interpretation, and follow-through. When conditions support fast recognition and low-friction action, movement stays distributed and forward. When they don't, work shifts back to travelers (second-guessing, backtracking) and to agents (intervention, assistance).
Travelers arriving from public transit and the airport tram enter through central escalators that deposit them directly into the middle of the lobby. The majority of that flow turns right, toward the economy kiosks and the standard security checkpoint, where it meets traffic entering from the north curb. This is amplified by the fact that the busiest security checkpoint intersects the kiosk area, creating a pinch point when security lines spill into the lobby.
A third dynamic compounds the first two. A central ride-hailing pickup area sits at the south end of the lobby, while the departures lobby itself sits directly above the baggage-claim level. Many arriving travelers must come upstairs and walk south to be picked up. Those who ascend via the north escalator traverse the entire departure floor to do so, creating a steady stream of non-departing traffic moving laterally through active departure zones — and adding to the head of congestion at the north end.
3. Signage and Station Design Break Down Under Load
Given these inflow patterns, the lobby's ability to manage throughput depends especially on effective signage and on the lobby's ability to adapt during peak periods. ORD struggles on both.
Travelers entering from the central escalators are immediately confronted by the central signage monument. The monument is not poor in isolation, and a space like ORD requires some signage complexity. But several elements add to that complexity rather than reducing it. Adjacent signage — the Bag Drop Shortcut entry sign, for example — assumes prior actions ("already added your bags") that many travelers cannot easily place in time or channel. The security nomenclature ("Pre‑Check," "Security 1," "Security 1A") is functionally opaque, especially for first-time ORD travelers, and forces interpretation precisely when interpretation is most expensive.
The underlying pattern is consistent across signage, naming, and station scope: each places interpretation cost on the traveler at exactly the moment when interpretation is least possible. Under load, travelers default to the most visible queue — which is rarely the most efficient one — and the work shifts back to agents.
This co-creation lens offered a more concrete way to evaluate the lobby against the Lobby team's principles: by asking to what extent the space provides the conditions for participation — conditions that make functional decisions low-effort and fast, reserving "choice" for discretionary aims. The model was applied heuristically at ORD by tracking where the environment facilitated or hindered participation across the elements that influence forward movement, distribution, consistency, flexibility, and self-service.
2. Inflow Geography Concentrates Traffic and Suppresses Self-Service
Lobby traffic enters from three sources: curbside drop-off along the terminal, central escalators from public transit and the airport tram, and north/south escalators from the floor below.
Curbside drop-off is disproportionately heavy on the north end, in front of the economy area. Vehicles queue most densely in front of the blue "Check‑In" (economy) signage, while traffic thins near Premier and Bag Drop Shortcut signage. The pattern suggests that curbside signage is shaping misleading expectations about eligibility: the juxtaposition of "Check‑In" with "Premier" invites a false inference that all south-end interior services are reserved for premium travelers only.
Impact
The work was translated into a set of shared evaluation criteria to inform concept development for the 2027 ORD rebuild. Because the redesign had to balance multiple constraints — including commercial real estate considerations around potential expansion or resizing of the lobby — the research was not treated as a prescriptive blueprint for one "correct" layout. Instead, it became a durable set of criteria for whether any proposed layout makes participation easy under load, i.e., whether it reduces functional decision burden in the moments where travelers are least able to deliberate.
Those criteria were consolidated into three principles, now serving as a shared reference across the Lobby team and architectural planning:
Include the full lobby within customers' range of experiences. Ensure travelers entering from the north end are not effectively cut off from usable options or forced into long, conflicting cross-traffic just to access core functions.
Align functionality with behavior and expectations. Make sequencing and naming reflect how travelers actually interpret clearance levels and progression (e.g., checkpoint ordering that matches an intuitive N→S progression rather than forcing interpretation).
Minimize customer decisions. Reduce moments where travelers must stop, compare options, or infer what applies to them; use landmarks and information structures that mirror the lobby's physical logic so orientation and selection happen quickly.
In practice, these principles supported decisions and tradeoffs around entry experience, checkpoint strategy, kiosk alignment, station placement, and where human presence should reduce uncertainty rather than manage preventable confusion. More broadly, the work provided a repeatable way to evaluate throughput as a coordination problem rather than a capacity problem, so the same criteria can be applied beyond ORD as hub lobby modernization continues.
The broader takeaway, beyond airport lobbies: throughput in high-pressure transitional spaces is co-created. The strategic question is not how much capacity to add. It's how legible the environment makes the right action when travelers are least able to deliberate.