During the last flight I had on Virgin America a passenger turned around to the person behind them and politely but firmly pointed out…

“Whatever you are doing is bouncing my seat!”

The women behind him replied…

“I am just trying to turn the volume down, sorry!”

I nerdily chortled to myself.

This is a pattern I see over and over again. The touch-screens on Virgin America’s entertainment system, “RED”, require a certain finesse that when not mastered result in a huge nuisance for the person sitting in front of you. Good luck if you get a kid behind you punching away at the touchscreen or a channel surfer changing channels the whole flight. In all Virgin America’s orchestrated experiential glory this design problem haunts nearly every flight I am on.

I can see the mental models and personas of the experience designers for the airline staring at passenger goals like…

• peace&quiet
• focus
• comfort
• relaxation
• sleep

But what they didn’t catch is that their choice of user interface is essentially teaching people to push incessantly at their fellow passenger’s seats. A seat mounted In-flight touch-screen is the new kid kicking your seat. All of this was an interesting reminder of how these emerging natural user interfaces and touch user interfaces leave marks and make ripples in the physical world. So how do they fix it? Higher quality touch screens? Too expensive. I would wager mounting the touchscreen in a similar fashion to the tray table could work?