Designing Travel App Experience from Scratch
Anamoul Rouf
Product: ShareTrip Mobile Application
Timeline: October 2018 - March 2019
My Role: UX Research, UI/UX Design
Tools: Miro, Adobe XD, Zeplin, Figma, Notion.
Platform: iOS and Android.
Team Collaboration: Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, and Tech.
Background
ShareTrip is the pioneer online travel aggregator (OTA) in Bangladesh. Initially, it was providing offline flights, hotels, and holiday package booking services.
Design Challenge
Our challenge was to design Android and iOS mobile applications from scratch, ensuring functionality, simplicity, intuitiveness, easy-to-use, conversion-friendly, and frictionless booking experience.
Outcome
The success rate was 76% in the booking experience.
55% of the users revisit.
Our online booking was increased by 25%.
Design Thinking & Lean UX Design
I helped the team to choose a mixed approach of Design Thinking and the Lean UX design process.
I have no idea about the travel industry!
So I started seeking answers to my questions, understanding the end goal from users and business perspectives.
What does the product do?
Who is the audience? Where they live, what they think, like & do? Where / When / How / Why /How often do they use it?
What are the business goals?
Do the business goals support the user goals?
I asked questions to 30 people of different ages, occupations, and categories.
Out of which 48.5% were males, and 51.5% were females. They are mainly from 20-55 years of age. Collaboratively I worked with our product, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support teams.
The insights from the answers to those questions were interesting.
Do you think you would enjoy the experience of having a travel expert plan an entire trip for you? Why or why not?
Participant #5 | Age 32 | Male
Unlikely, I wouldn’t mind receiving a plan from an expert. I would appreciate time to explore more on my own.
Participant #5 | Age 25 | Female
No, we like the freedom of planning our own travels and don’t enjoy the constraints of a trip planned by someone else. It usually doesn’t allow any spontaneity during the trip.
Participant #9 | Age 45 | Male
Yes, because they would have a lot more experience than me. It would save me a lot of time.
I analyzed Make My Trip, Kayak, Agoda, Expedia, Booking.com, Rate Hawk, Hopper, Goibio, Airbnb, Skyscanner, and others popular online travel apps.
I explored their booking journey flow through platforms and visited Google Playstore, Appstore, and social media pages to know about their users.
To make the service more engaging to the users we built a Gamified Travel App system. We also introduced TripCoin, a virtual currency.
We used game elements and the Point Badge Leaderboard (PBL) system.
We came up with a wheel game, Spin to Win and Treasure Chest.
I put together a product feature roadmap of the features needed and a priority list based on our goals and objectives.
Must Have
Users should able to do flight bookings.
Users should be able to do hotel bookings.
Users should be able to manage flight & hotel bookings.
Users should be able to manage their profile.
Users should be able to play games & earn TripCoins.
Users should be able to redeem TripCoins as discount.
Users should be able to make payments easily.
Nice to Have
Live Chat with customer care.
Available seats, add extra baggage, seat selection, meal selection during flight bookings.
Special request, room request during hotel bookings.
Payment form after the booking is accepted.
... and more.
We created digital wireframes and built a low-fidelity prototype. Also, we conducted a series of sessions for usability testing.
It helps us to get more valuable, valid, and actionable user inputs for the app to keep the process smooth.
We invited some focus group users for usability testing sessions.
We set a list of tasks assigned to our participants & collect their feedback during those testing sessions.
Initially, we built basic style guidelines. Afterward, we built a highly customizable design system to create a design language through all the platforms and make the design more productive way.
We conducted three smaller in-person user testing sessions.
The goal was to assess the overall usability of the app and identify areas for improvements that could facilitate the completion of the tasks.
We refined the design and created deliverables for development hand-off.
Prepared design documentations
Write user stories
Shared the UI screens to Zeplin
Maintained close communication with the team
Unit testing sessions with the demos
We've monitored and measured the results for the first 6 months.
The booking experience was seamless and intuitive & the success rate was 76%.
The gamification helps us to get more of our users revisit. It was 55% of the user.
Our online booking was increased by 25%.
Experience the mobile app.
I’ve experienced how to design a product and its life cycle and create a well-functioning app from scratch.
I’ve mastered digging into people’s consumer minds.
I learned quickly that inviting the right participants is crucial for getting valuable results from the usability testing sessions.
I also discovered the mistakes and fixed them.
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Posted Oct 3, 2023
We designed and developed a fully functional travel app from scratch.
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ShareTrip
