User Interviews and Affinity Mapping

To gain a better understanding of the problem space (and to avoid designing for myself), I conducted 5 user interviews to validate my assumptions and better understand my users’ needs, wants and pain points.

To make sure I was targeting the right people to interview, I created an empathy map to list out my key assumptions about the user group.

To enable consistency between these interviews, I created a series of guiding questions as part of my research plan and linked these questions to an objective to ensure these questions were purposeful.

Over the course of a week, I interviewed 5 people to understand their travel habits. I found that travellers sit on a spectrum between‘planners’ and ’non-planners’, and:

Personas

While there were clearly overlaps between the two groups of potential users identified, I decided to focus on the needs of the 'planner' due to project time constraints and to make the product as tailored as possible for the 'planner' user group.

To guide the design process, the interview findings for 'the planner' was distilled into this persona below:

Key touch points in the user journey

A high level customer journey was developed to unpack the planning process. At a high level, most users followed this process:

1. Research activities to add to their wish list
2. Book flights
3. Create itinerary
4. Book accommodation
5. Arrange transport
6. Buy insurance

A detailed customer journey map was developed to zero in on key touch points where the proposed solution would add the most value and remove areas of stress for travel planners.

As evident in the user journey below, the user’s emotional state starts to dip when the intensive research phase starts, then is at the lowest during the itinerary arrangement process, and picks up again once the user makes bookings and goes on their trip. Based on this insight I wanted to focus my solution on helping the users during their emotional low points – during research and itinerary arrangement.

The name of the product 'Travel Pal' was developed at this stage as the product aims to become the travel planner's pal during the travel planning process.

User stories and Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

User stories enabled the design process to be thought of from the users’ perspective through defining the functionality of each features based on what the user wants and why. User stories were used to inform the MVP.

Through using an MVP matrix, the MVP was defined based on a combination of the features identified in the ideation exercise above, the user stories and feasibility per the time frame given. The MVP is seen in section 1 of the matrix below.

User flow

During the wireframing and prototyping stage, I wanted to focus my effort to design and test the core feature of the product with the user. That is, helping the user alleviate planning stress through creating a central research tool for itinerary planning which automatically optimises the users' trip route. A detailed user flow was created to facilitate this.

Wireframes & Wireflows

As a first step to the design phase, analogue wireframes were created to visualise the features identified in the MVP.

As competitors' products were evaluated on 'completeness of design', (and having both a web interface and an app was a consideration of this), I created wireframes for both the app and website for my prototype.

Wireflows were developed from the wireframes produced to inform the prototype stage.

While several areas of improvement identified, I focused the second iteration on having one section of the website done well first. This design decision was made as the website is essentially made up of three key sections which follow the same functionality:

1. Activity search
2. Accommodation search
   
3. Dining search

For this iteration, I focused on the 'activity search' section (See a demo of my prototype below).

This was an exciting project that I definitely learnt a lot from.

From undertaking this 10 weeks solo project, some of my key learnings are:

• Through working on my own project, I fell in love with the UX Design process and can definitely see the value which adequate research and planning brings for the rest of the project to inform design

• The limitations of the software chosen meant that the prototype at times could not behave the way I wanted it to. The designs I came up with were sometimes a compromise between what I wanted and what the software could do, which also irritated the testers alike. If taken to a developer to built, I will prototype it the way I intend for it to work, write up a functional specification document and have a proper knowledge transfer session with the developers

• You can't include everyone in your design - otherwise you will design something that satisfies no one and takes too long to build. I hit a road bump during the design process when I found myself trying to cater to the needs of too many types of holiday-goers.  While it was useful to identify that travellers fell onto a spectrum of planning, I should have focused my efforts on designing features which my primary persona (planners) required, rather than try to define features that would meet the needs of everyone. More inclusive features should only be considered as the product is developed beyond the MVP.

• Proper prioritisation is an invaluable step that should not be overlooked as the initial MVP defined was more than 'minimum', and the number of features defined was more than what could be produced in the one week timeframe that was set aside for prototyping

Overall, I learnt a lot about the different, yet similar ways, in which people planned their holidays, and how everyone faces the same problem in terms of holiday research, itinerary planing, and trip optimisation. Most importantly, I learnt that I love solving problems which alleviate stress for my users and bring a positive impact to their lives.