UX-BudgetTravel

Budget Travel

Budget Travel is an application that will be available to many users who are in need of help when it comes to planning a trip with a limited budget. We want to make sure that we provide all of the users’ needs and to make sure that we thrive at a high level in the traveling category for the applications and surpass the other competitors.

UX Team Members

• Nissa Lieu - Created User Stories, Created Personas and Scenarios, Created Wireframes, Created a Minimum Viable Product, Researched competitors, Performed Heuristic Analysis and Competitive Analysis, Moderated pilot tests, Created data entries for our pilot tests.
• Paulina Rosales - Created some User Stories, created some Personas and Scenarios, helped make sketches, helped plan and make a Wireframe (from a User Story), helped research Competitors and performed a Heuristic Analysis as well as Competitive Analysis.
• Gustavo Bravo Corona - Created User Stories, Created Personas And Scenarios, Did some Competitive analysis and Demographics, Created a Minimum Variable Product/Sketch, Created A Wireframe, Created a Prototype for Tasks, Moderated pilot tests.

User-Centered Design Artifacts

• Personas and Scenarios
• Sketches and Diagrams
• Wireframes
• Prototype

Phase I: Analyzing Users, Competitors, and Initial Designs

Executive Summary

Traveling the world may seem like an exciting and memorable experience, but what about the planning? With Budget Travel users can efficiently book flights, hotels, transportation, and activities with just a few clicks. We conducted research and analysis on different competitors to understand how best to meet users’ needs and how we can make their experience using Budget Travel stand out amongst similar products on the market.

• Competitive analysis of top competitors gave an overview of how best to serve users
  • Clear communication: Users express frustration when they cannot speak to a representative or have a way to resolve issues
  • History of transactions: Users expressed that bookings were not made even though payment was accepted.
• Heuristic evaluation of a top competitor found that an appealing design that draws the users’ attention to important information/data can help users navigate through a website better
• Personas and scenarios helped understand who potential users may be and why they would be interested in using Budget Travel:
  • Being able to plan a budget-friendly trip
  • Simplifying the trip-planning process
  • The ability to include how many people will go on a trip
  • Splitting costs among several users
• Sketches gave a rough idea of how the layout should be:
  • Separating bookings by type (hotel, transportation, flights, and activities)
  • Search for bookings based on user input (location, people going, budget, proximity, and dates)
  • Being upfront about pricing by including additional fees in the advertised price

  Full phase I report

Phase II: Refining interaction and designing wireframes

Executive Summary Budget Travel has many capabilities, ranging from creating trips, showing a user’s budget, booking flights, and more. Wireframes were created to showcase these interactions, one of which was evaluated by another UX designer. The feedback given on the Checking For Nearby Restaurants wireframe helped Budget Travel’s UX team know how much detail should be included in the wireframes, as well as how to limit confusion by making each step clear. In addition, the informal feedback given to the SE team helped give a general idea of what features to implement and what ideas to shift away from.

• We modeled our wireframes after the sketches we created in Phase I
• Wireframes were created based on expected user interactions, which were used to guide the SE team and give a general idea of Budget Travel’s capabilities. Our completed wireframes model the following interactions:
  • User Login
  • User Sign Up
  • Flight Booking
  • Checking for Nearby Restaurants
  • Adding a Budget
  • Creating/Editing Trips
• Cognitive walkthroughs were conducted with the help of a fellow UX designer, who was given a description of our persona “John” and an accompanying scenario “The Family Trip” to better understand the purpose of our wireframe. The UX designer was meant to act as “John” and attempt to complete the task “search for nearby restaurants”. Once the UX designer completed their tasks, they provided feedback based on each step they took. Based on the feedback we received, we concluded that:
  • Users want to filter options by their specified budget, not just price
  • We should clarify what interactions our wireframes are modeled after
  • The user’s budget should be visible and easy to access
• The SE team presented what they created and received Informal Feedback, which let us know what else we can implement into Budget Travel (and possible wireframes to create) as well as how to better the users’ experience
  • Features to add
    • Available activity
    • Destinations
    • Other user activity
    • Breakdown activities based on the budget
    • Create trips
  • Ideas to discard
    • Do not put the sales pitch on the launch page

Full phase II report

Phase III: Prototypes and User Testing

Executive Summary Budget Travel is created to be an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand application having a wide amount of options to customize a Trip. Once we had the wireframes all created to showcase the different interactions, we were able to move forward and generate a functioning prototype involving those wireframes and interactions. For the Usability Test, we had 3 different tasks that we would assign to the participants to see how difficult it was to achieve them. The feedback given from the Usability Tests helped us understand how well we were able to map a mental model for a user when they were asked to complete each task. We were able to collect more feedback about each participant by asking them multiple questions a the end of the test to be able to further improve our application.

• We created interactive Prototypes based on some Wireframes we created in Phase II
• Prototypes were created based on the specific tasks that we created, which were then assigned to the participants to complete each time and give them an interactive feeling of how the final application is intended to work. Our interactive Prototype included these wireframe models:
  • User Login
  • Password Recovery
  • Adding a Budget
  • Creating/Editing Trips
  • Road Trip Planning

• A Pilot Test was conducted within the UX team to test run the prototypes. This helped the team get comfortable with how to lead a usability test with participants outside of the Budget Travel UX team.

• Usability Tests were done with six participants, who were asked a few questions relating to their travel habits and then given three tasks to complete. Upon the completion of each task, the participants were asked to rate their difficulty. Once all tasks were completed, the participants were given a few closing questions about their experience with Budget Travel and its features. The usability tests offered insightful feedback about the app’s design, layout, and ease of use. The UX team can use the participant’s feedback and responses to improve Budget Travel and the users’ experience.

Full phase III report