I was the main designer leading this project through ideating early concepts, running design sprints, presenting regularly to leadership, and delivering final assets for production.

Project Summary

When a user searches for a trip, they’re presented with a packaged trip and are shown all essential information regarding flight and hotel details.

The company found that there was a significant drop-off rate after the users trip search. Our goal was to increase retention through a redesign.

Product Prior to Redesign

After gathering data and testing, we discovered that users perceived the app as cluttered and untrustworthy. This was because —

1. After the user’s search query they were presented with a wide array of trip details, therefore, the interface felt cluttered and difficult to manage

2. Since the trip details, such as; flight and accommodation can change and consequently so does the pricing, the initial price was perceived as inaccurate and therefore users questioned the integrity of the product

3. The user journey displayed through the navigation bar was inconsistent with the actual user journey, making the experience feel untrustworthy

Developing our User Personas

Now that I had a better understanding of how customers felt, I thought it was important to define our key personas to help drive our design decisions moving forward.

Defining the details of someone who was interested in luxury travel for leisure, and the “digital nomad” who most likely has simpler concerns in amenities, would help us design for a wide range of users.

After a few revisions and collaboration between stakeholders, engineers, and myself, we came up with a journey and redesign that created retention and increased user success rate.

After my redesign, we were able to increase the total number of bookings, which was a huge success. Above are a few milestones that are directly tied to the redesign.

Check out the final prototype to the right —

Design

After carefully mapping out our flow, and conducting our research methods, we wanted to have a high-fidelity wireframe to present to engineers and stakeholders. Ideally, I would have created medium-fidelity wireframes at this point in this process, but due to time constraints and an agile project style, we moved into creating high-fidelity prototypes.

As the lead, I worked on prioritizing changes and creating a diligent process to ensure deadlines were met.

My strategy with these designs was to address the specific points of friction through careful attention to copy and to make sure elements of our design system were clear and accessible — and consistent throughout the experience.

My Roles

• User Experience (UX) Designer

• User Interface (UI) Designer

Tools

• Figma

• Illustrator

• Miro

Team

• 5 developers

• Project Manager

• Product Manager

Trip Summary Redesign | Lead UX Designer

Research

Firstly, my research consisted of a deep dive into our app store reviews which helped me gain a preliminary understanding of our user frustrations. As well as a competitive analysis to better understand and develop our user journey and create a unique yet familiar user interface. Lastly, I conducted one-on-one user interviews to gain qualitative and emotional insight.

User Interviews

I then emailed 100 of our original users and sent out a preliminary survey to gauge which users were the best fit for our user testing.

I looked at a few key stats to better understand who to conduct interviews with, below are a few questions from my preliminary survey —

• What was their annual travel spend was

• How often they traveled per year

• Were they using an android or apple device for their online bookings?

Developing the User Journey

Now that we understood who the user was, what their needs were, and what was causing our existing users’ frustrations, I created the first user journey map. It was clear to me that the absence of a journey map was creating hiccups in both the user experience and causing disruptions in the implementation process with developers.

Thankfully, our user journeys between segment groups were very similar. However, their priorities revealed emotional nuances that would determine our design hierarchy later on in the design process.

Final Thoughts

Challenges

The most challenging part of this project was synthesizing data gathered during the research phase. I quickly realized that it was my job as the lead designer to present the data collected in a way that was effective and concise. Ultimately, working with such a small team meant I needed to be the spokesperson for our users.

Lessons

I've learned that design is never linear but a continuous loop we keep learning from. It's better to have a version you can iterate and improve on than to waste time on the minor details. If I could work on this project again or a similar one, I would present it to engineers earlier. This being the first major project within the team, I realized it was valuable to have their feedback through all iterations and address ideas.

What’s next?

Ideally, I would have continued building on the company’s personas to ensure we make product decisions based on their needs.

After narrowing down our group of users to 10, I conducted interviews with each one. I allowed them to search and book with the app to gain better insight into their mental models and the frustrations they go through when booking through our app.

In-depth Analysis of Product Prior to Redesign

Persona 1: The Digital Nomad

Problem Statement

There was a significant drop-off rate at the search query results screen.

Users often didn’t move through the rest of the user journey after this screen, so we were experiencing a low booking volume.