Intrepid Travel recently created a new product line of comfort trips aimed at a more mature market segment. The company also wanted to create a mobile presence and had been hearing from customers that it was difficult to search for trips by dates. Our team set out to design a mobile app that would allow users to efficiently search for and book all aspects of a trip.
The team started the project off by conducting a heuristic evaluation of the similarities and differences between five competitors: GAdventures, Trafalgar, Adventure Center, RoadTrippers and Hipmunk. We checked to see if the competitors had a mobile presence and studied the features they were incorporating into their apps or responsive sites to find opportunities for Intrepid to distinguish itself.
We used both interviews and surveys to capture data from people about their travel planning and booking behaviors. The people that we interviewed and surveyed came from a wide range of age groups and had varying spending power. After collecting all of the results from the surveys and interviews, we wrote the information down on post-it notes and conducted an affinity mapping session to group together similar results.
We created personas based on our user research to reflect the needs and goals of the wide range of users that we interviewed and surveyed. This helped us create user scenarios and map user flows of the trip purchasing process from searching to booking.
We mapped out user flows for our personas so that we could see the activities that would have to take place for each user to get from start (searching for a trip) to finish (booking a trip).
Due to the wide range of user needs, we focused on the one pain point that was a commonality amongst most of the users we interviewed and surveyed: having to search multiple sites and keep open many tabs in order to find the trip that best fit their needs. We posed the question, "would people book a complete vacation package on a mobile app?", and set out to create a minimum viable product that would prove our hypothesis that people would if we provide them with a travel service that allows users to organize and book vacation packages, flights, lodging, and transportation components in one place.
We started off with each member of the team doing individual sketches, which led us into spending the day doing a design studio to narrow down our ideas. Since we didn't have much time for the project, this was a great way for us to reach consensus about our designs quickly. After several rounds of iterating on our previous sketches, we were ready to start creating wireframes.
Once we felt that our designs had been more fleshed out, we moved into prototyping and user testing. We started off by creating a low fidelity prototype in Axure so that we could do some user testing. After testing our prototype on some users, we quickly realized there were some problems with our design.
With our findings from the user testing, we went back to the drawing board to figure out how we should address the usability issues that we observed. After some discussion, I began adding a higher fidelity to the prototype and implementing the changes that we discussed as a team.