In recent years Air Canada’s Project XM drove the adoption of seat-back in-flight entertainment consoles across the fleet. They even aired this advertisement (relentlessly I might add) last year to publicize the project.
The content Air Canada makes available is great but the IFE interface itself needs work. Having wrestled with it countless times I thought reviewing it might be beneficial to anyone involved with it and potentially even therapeutic to me. As a software engineer I can confidently say that all of the suggestions and fixes I propose below can definitely be made.
Needed Fixes
The latency needs to be addressed. The current response time is just not good enough. My heart really goes out to Air Canada flight attendants that have to sheepishly ask passengers to be patient as “the system takes several moments to respond” before every single flight. Do what it takes.
The user interface is not user friendly. At all. If a screen becomes slightly mis-calibrated some of the buttons (and the content behind them) become inaccessible. This has happened to me on more than one occasion – usually with the buttons on the bottom left. When this happens to me I find the stir stick from my last Cuba Libre to be a great stylus replacement.
The very first decision the viewer must make is a choice between languages: English or French. Those that select French can still navigate to content that is only available in English. For example the currently showing and hilarious Modern Family. Was this based on the assumption that there are bilingual people out there that would prefer the UI in one language and the content in another? Or was this just an oversight?
Shouldn’t that button say Anglais? ;)
Non-functioning features should not feature on the UI I can’t count how many times I’ve wrestled with the sluggish UI only to be met with this screen:
Feature not available.
I understand that it’s common practice to increase the volume during commercials but for the love of god please take it down a notch. I almost burst my eardrums last time.
Nice to haves
Selective interruptions. As you know when crew make announcements IFE content is paused. Ordinarily that’s not a big deal but it can be. On my way down to Buenos Aires last year everything was announced in English, French and Spanish which made watching anything positively infuriating.
User interfaces in languages other than English and French would be nice. It would involve a bit of effort and cost but would really make a world of difference to those that don’t speak either.
It’s important to note that despite the shortcomings I have mentioned the IFE is still pretty good and certainly leaps and bounds ahead of most other North American carriers.
What has your experience with Air Canada’s IFE been?
