Planning for Participation:
Redesigning Airport Layout

Summary

Airport departure terminals are transitional spaces that must absorb rising volumes within fixed footprints. As travel demand grows, major carriers must continually rethink these spaces. I led research for one such effort to understand how to increase throughput and self-service without adding space or agents. Combining day-of-travel app data, operational data, and in-situ observation, the research documented how congestion is created upstream. Uneven inflow concentrates travelers early, steering them toward the economy/security core. Spillover lines and ride-hailing cross-traffic amplify clustering and suppress use of other stations. Inconsistent or unclear signage also increases interpretation costs during busy periods, and travelers default to visible queues—shifting work back to agents and undermining self-service. The research established orientation principles for ongoing rebuild efforts.

Key words: hub lobby redesign, ORD, lobby throughput, entry‑flow distribution, self‑service adoption, kiosk and bag‑drop utilization, wayfinding, cognitive load, signage consistency, queue formation, operational scalability.

* Note: specifics details of this project have been omitted for proprietary reasons.

Problem Space

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.

In the space of the departure lobby, that entails redesigning lobby environments so they can support greater volume with clearer service segmentation, stronger self-service, and more reliable throughput—without relying on proportional increases in staffing or footprint.

As part of United's effort to meet this challenge, O’Hare International Airport (ORD) was selected as a priority hub for this redesign work. From both a research and product standpoint, 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.

Rather than optimizing individual features in isolation, the project called for a deeper evaluation of how the lobby functions as a system, and how business goals and customer experience must be harmonized over the long term.

To guide that 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 – creating clear entry points and pathways that support continuous forward movement without backtracking.

• Distributed – segmenting services and pathways to balance demand across the lobby while supporting different customer needs, including accessibility and privacy.

• Consistent – promoting clarity through uniformity in signage, naming, and sequencing, within ORD and across airports where possible.

• Flexible – enabling layouts and service positioning that can adapt to short-term operational needs and remain durable over time.

• Self-service – expanding effective use of mobile and kiosk-based tools while minimizing non–value add behaviors and unnecessary agent interactions.

The role of research was to evaluate the current-state ORD lobby using these principles from a customer experience perspective, identifying where the existing environment supported the intended mode, and where it fell short. These findings would inform architectural and operational decisions in the redesign execution.

Each principle gave rise to a set of questions grounded 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, customers 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, customers hesitate, backtrack, or concentrate in ways that undermine the system’s performance.

ORD served as a test case for examining this alignment. Grounded in the Lobby team’s principles, the research assessed where the current environment supported United Next’s throughput ambitions—and where gaps between design intent and customer behavior introduced friction that would limit scalability over time.

Research Design

The work was conducted over a multi-week period and combined four elements:

Quantitative analysis of existing digital and operational data — including 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 — to establish where demand concentrated, where capacity went underused, and how patterns varied by location and touchpoint.

On-site behavioral observation — focused on customer entry-point choice, initial orientation, navigation, backtracking, queuing, and social herding behaviors — to document how travelers actually committed to pathways and options under time pressure, particularly near kiosks, bag drop areas, 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, social psychology of uncertainty and social proof in high-pressure settings, and anthropology of transitory “non-places” (e.g., Marc Augé) — used to contextualize observed behavior and strengthen interpretation without relying on speculation.

Together, these inputs were used to evaluate the current-state ORD lobby against the Lobby team’s principles and to frame the questions addressed in the research insights that follow.

Research Insights

1. Throughput as Co‑Creation.

Before turning to location-specific research, the study called for a bedrock-first approach: examining our most basic the assumptions about the departure lobby space and how travelers interact with it.

Within anthropological contexts, airports have sometimes been treated as textbook “non‑places”: transient spaces organized around circulation and compliance rather than identity, history, or relationship. Much discussion has been devoted to an apparent tension between these spaces and their effects on those interacting with them: efficiency at the price of de-personalization.

The broader research landscape complicates this picture. Social and environmental psychology suggest less a dynamic of alienation than of tacit agreement about autonomy under constraint. When travelers enter the lobby, they effectively consent to to strict behavioral constraints in exchange for an environment that reduces functional decisions. Travelers 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. Rather, 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 (Figure 2). When those conditions support fast recognition and low‑friction action, movement stays distributed and forward. When they don’t, work shifts back onto travelers (second‑guessing, backtracking) and onto agents (intervention, assistance).

This co‑creation lens offered a more concrete way to evaluate the lobby against the lobby team's principles; namely, by asking to what extent the space provides the conditions for participation , i.e., conditions that eliminate deliberation, making functional decisions low‑effort and fast and reserving “choice” for discretionary aims. We applied the model heuristically at ORD by tracking where the environment facilitates or hinders participation across the elements that influence forward movement, distribution, consistency, flexibility and self-service.

2. The Main Sources of Lobby Congestions at O’Hare

While the conditions that facilitate or deter forward movement, distribution, consistency, flexibility, and self-service are interrelated, they can be understand as arising through two processes:

(a) the sources of inflow and their effect on traffic patterns, distribution across the lobby space, and self-service;

(b) The effectiveness of signage and functional layout in determining navigation, cognitive load, and agent interaction.

How each of these processes unfold at ORD will be taken up in turn.

(a) Traffic Inflow, Distribution, and Self-Service Breakdown

Traffic within the lobby enters from three sources:: (i) curbside drop-off along the terminal, and (ii) central escalators directing traffic from public transit and the airport tram, and (iii) north and south escalators from the level below.

Roadside traffic is disproportionately heavy on the north end, in front of the economy area (FIgure 3). Vehicles queue most densely in front of the blue ‘Check In’ (i.e,, economy) signage, while traffic thins near Premier and Bag Drop Shortcut signage.

This pattern suggests that curbside signage 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.

Travelers arriving from public transit and airpot tram enter the lobby through central escalators that deposit passengers directly into the middle of the lobby (Figure 4). The majority of traffic from there flows to the right, towards the economy kiosks and standard security touchpoint. This flow meets the traffic entering from the north end of the curb, creating congestion around the economy kiosks. This is exacerbated by the fact that the busiest security checkpoint intersects the kiosk area, creating a pinch point when security lines spill into the lobby.

Congestion around the north-end economy section is exacerbated still further by the location of a central ride-hailing pickup area at the south end of the lobby (see again Figure 4). The departures lobby sits directly on top the baggage-claim area, located on the floor below. Many travelers who arrive at ORD and intend to hail a ride after picking up their bags must go upstairs and south. Those who ascend via the north escalator must traverse the entire departure lobby floor (or walk outside). This creates a steady stream of non-departing traffic moving laterally through active departure zones, contributing to the head of congestion created by those attempting to check in or reach security.

The kiosk and station usage patterns mirror the these flow dynamics (Figures 5 and 6). Kiosk and stations located along main paths see high usage, while stations that require lateral movement or backtracking are avoided.

(b) Consistency and Flexibility Break Down Under Load

Given these inherent congestion patterns, the lobby’s ability to manage throughput effectively depends especially so on effective signage and the lobby’s ability to adapt to periods of peak demand.

At ORD, travelers who enter from the central escalators are immediately confronted by the central signage monument (Figure 7A). While by no means poor, and while monuments like this in general undoubtedly have to have some level of complexity in a large, fast-moving place like ORD, key elements arguably increase that complexity rather than decreasing it. Other adjacent signage, like the Bag Drop Shortcut entry sign (7B), assumes prior actions (“already added your bags”) that many travelers cannot easily place in time or channel. But most problematic is the security nomenclature (“Pre-Check,” “Security 1,” “Security 1A”) (7C), which is functionally opaque, especially for travelers at ORD for the first time. .

Like most airports, distribution at ORD relies almost entirely on travelers self-selecting alternatives. This does not always work in practice, and Additional Services illustrates this tension most clearly (Figure 8). The station’s function is so defined that , instead of absorbing demand, it often redirects travelers back into the very queues they are trying to avoid.

Strategic Impact

This 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 and/or resizing of the lobby—the research was not treated as a prescriptive blueprint for one “correct” layout. Instead, it translated into durable 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 overarching principles (Figure 9), which became a shared reference point 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/function, 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—not just a capacity problem—so the same criteria can be applied beyond ORD as United scales lobby modernization across hubs.