My first design Challenge
I recently took part in a UX/UI Design challenge where the idea was to design a tool for multi-city vacation planning that help the travelers create itinerary connects multiple points of interest. This writing details out how the itinerary building experience look like.
Problem Statement:
How to create a streamlined multi-city travel booking experience that is smart enough to accommodate customized travel preferences based on user’s budget, interest and schedule.
Personas:
Business Traveler: Donald is a marketing manager that travels 70% of the time in U.S. Beside his travel between different destination for marketing programs, he would like to make some short stops along the route to meet family and friends according to his schedule if time permitted.
Exploratory Traveler: Ryan is a college student, he wants to go on a trip with his friends for summer holiday to visit as many locations as possible, under limited budget.
Vacation Traveler: Jing is planning out her honey moon vacation at a series of 3 dream cities with husband: New York, DC and Orlando. She is curious what vacation packages the platform could offer, hopefully include vehicle rental and hotels as well.
Competitive Analysis
Looks like there are many traveling websites have already provided multi-city search feature that provide the convenience to book multiple flights at the same time. However, it is hard to compare between flights to get the best deal. Travelers still need to go to multiple sites, try various dates, rearrange destination orders and check different airlines.
Business Goals
- Promote booking through the platform
- Help clearing last-minute vacancies for hotel, rental car and flights to maximize profit
- Fulfill multi-city travelers by providing flexibility on location and dates entries to make the most of their vacation time.
Traverlers’ Pain Points
None of existing solutions on market empowers cross comparison that epitomize how final price could vary by dates and location on a multi-stops search. Travelers still need to enter the same trip info repeatedly to traverse through all options for the best price.
Key Features
- Recommend deals for alternative date
- Filter by airports, airlines, and other transportation methods.
- Allow dates range to be entered for finding the best price among several days.
- Default “destination” to anywhere to promote travelers explore recommended destinations.
- Provide recommended deals based on user’s search entry.
- Sort by: Price and Match(user entry)
Exploring Concepts
The listing of flight details looks extremely clunky. It is hard to tell the difference between trip schedules at a glance. In the meantime, the surface would look nothing different from existing solutions on market.
I end up decided to explore a graphic based visualization UI that could effectively present the timeline of a trip plan and allow user to make cross comparison on itineraries with different dates and locations, finding the best price at a glance.
Final Design
Visual Design
Landing Page
- Best Deals for Tomorrow
- Open Destination
- Open Return Date
Search Options
- Search itineraries on a date range
- Destination can be “must visit” or “optional”
The all visual UI were inspired by Loan Luu’s design at BYTON’s CES Demo.
Success Metrics
If the design is implemented, there are two key problems I want to dive in to test:
- Are users able to understand and interact the current timeline UI to conduct a search?
- Do users find the current UI easier to use compare to the existing version?
Qualitative Research:
1. Sending out questionnaire and surveys to collect feedback on new design
2. Observing users during the search and booking process, ask them to speak out loud about how they feel and what brings their attention.
Quantitative Research:
3. Completion rates: how many users/percentages of users successfully completed booking compare to the old version (Google Analytics).
4. Retention rate: Do users finish the booking process, and come back to book again?
5. Growth of new users: If design significantly enhance the brand reputation by attracting new users.
