Discovery & Research
The research objective was to learn the process by which working millennials plan for a trip. Focusing on qualitative research, 8 interviews were conducted with travelers in the 25-34 age range with three main themes emerging:
1. Travelers are overwhelmed with the planning process.
2. Travelers are on some sort of a budget.
3. Having different food and activity options available are important to travelers.
Based on these themes and through brainstorming and ideation, I began to determine which features would best solve the problems millennial travelers were facing.
Ideate
Next, the focus went into ideation. I created a user scenario based on my user Stacie Williams. Using the data from the user interviews, Stacie’s main focus was to find unique “Instagram” worthy accommodations and activities that were interesting to her.
How might we create an app that encompasses budgeting, airline travel, and unique accommodations to alleviate the stresses that come with researching and the planning process?
Design
Doing a competitor analysis was helpful with finding out how to make the app feel curated for the individual traveler. Incorporating filters the user could personalize and having different activities they could add were two features I wanted to incorporate into the wireframes.
Testing
I ran user tests during every stage of the prototypes. Asking users to follow the flow, I had them perform the same three tasks:
Searching in Seattle, use filters to select preferred accommodations.
Enter your payment information and check out.
Search for activities, enter a budget, and add an activity to their itinerary.
It was during this stage that I realized I had missed a giant opportunity when building out the earlier prototypes. I was hyper-focused on getting the airline booking to work that I neglected what the testing data showed travelers wanted: unique accommodations and activities. For my high-fidelity mockups, I was sure to add these features in and updated the UI.
Reflections
Being my first project, I was really eager to jump straight into prototyping. I realized I was designing for myself, and not referring back to the data. Once I was able to step back and regroup, designing the high-fidelity mockups became a lot easier.
I could design endless pages, but if I had more time, I would have loved to explore how to add food and restaurant options since that was something people really wanted to include during their travels.