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Travelers are all too familiar with the notion of jumping from site to site to find the best flight and accomodation deals. This effort increases when they want to use credit card points or airline/hotel reward memberships to book their travel.
I worked as a UX Designer on an app that transforms the booking experience for travellers. It uses their preferences and membership details to aggregates all deals in one place.
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Gained insights into travellers’ booking process and pain points
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Defined the user persona and value proposition
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Brainstormed solutions, ideated user journey and analyzed competitors
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Designed wireframes, Mid-Fi and iOS Prototypes
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User tested prototypes and iterated design
For this app, I focussed on young professionals who travel upto 2-3 times a year for work or leisure. I conducted interviews with 5 such users with the following goals:
All interviewees used online comparison tools to book their flights and travel. However, they also spent a significant amount of time trying to compare these options with deals available through their loyalty program memberships.
"While booking flights, the first thing I do is go onto Sky Scanner. However, I’ve built up so many points with British Airways that I would prefer to book my flight with them."
"If I book a hotel room, I try not to splurge. This is where miles and points come into play as I want to minimize the money spent on transportation and lodging and maximize what I can spend doing fun activities."
"I do my own research on areas I want to stay in based on activities that are available around there."
I used my research to synthesize the main user persona of my app - Whiz.
I then defined Whiz’s value proposition based on this persona:
It is a travel comparison and booking tool to help young tech savvy professionals find the best possible travel and accommodation based on their reward program or credit card enrollment.
It is better than other similar tools as it automatically compares flight and accommodation prices based on a travellers proximity to activities that interest them, the deals that are available and their reward program preferences.
While observing user’s book their travel, I noticed that they expressed the most confusion and uncertainty when they had to toggle between travel comparison websites and websites of their preferred loyalty programs to compare deals. This was a key interaction where Whiz could shine.
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I brainstormed a wide range of ideas to help alleviate problems that user’s faced while booking their travel. The best ideas were picked based on their originality and ease of implementation. These came together in a Storyboard that highlighted an ideal user interaction on Whiz.
Nate wants to travel with his girlfriend to Mexico City. He starts by looking for round-trip flights.
He looks for deals with United Airlines as he is a United Gold Club member. He collects additional flight miles everytime he flies with them.
After he books his flight, he looks for where interesting activities like shopping and unique restaurants are located. He prefers to stay near those.
He looks for hotels or airbnbs in Condesa, an artsy neighborhood. He has heard of many interesting activities there.
He prefers to book his stay at the Marriott Hotel near Condesa as he collects points through the Bonvoy Program. This makes his stay cheaper overall.
He books his stay at the Marriott on points he collected last year. This is the least he has spent on an international vacation!
An extensive analysis of similar products in the market showed me where Whiz had the competitive edge.
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I used the ideas highlighted in the previous phase to draft an initial wireframe. This gave me an idea of the screens I would have to design.
Some key features of my prototype are highlighted here:
Streamlined process to enter loyalty program membership information.
All travel deals (listed by price or points) aggregated in one place.
Places of interest near accomodation highlighted.
I performed Guerilla Tests with my mid-fi prototype. The goal of these tests was to see if users could successfully sign up for the app, book hotels and flights and review information on upcoming travel.
All users were able to successfully complete the objectives mentioned above. They did however highlight some areas for improvement - like being able to see how many points they had in their repective accounts and getting automatic recommendations on best deals.
Through this project, I learnt the importance of gathering information from users BEFORE ideating any solutions. I also learnt that it is more important to observe users DO things than to take what they SAY at face value. Next time, I would like to include surveys as part of my user research to add more quantitative data to back my solution.
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