Manage your Trip

In 2017, Travel Republic aimed to enhance their user experience by going beyond just inspiring and facilitating trip purchases. They sought to provide comprehensive support to users before, during, and after their journeys, offering additional inspiration, enticing offers, and rewarding experiences for choosing Travel Republic.

To achieve their goal of accompanying users throughout their trips, Travel Republic envisioned an app concept. This concept aimed to simplify the entire travel journey, ensuring a stress-free experience and allowing users to focus on what truly matters: enjoying their well-deserved holidays. The proposed app would enable users to effortlessly organize every aspect of their trip, granting them more time and freedom to indulge in the most memorable moments.

INVOLVEMENT & DELIVERABLES

Project proposal
Lead the whole design process
User research
UX/UI
Prototype
User Testing

TOOLS

THE COMPANY

Travel Republic is one of the UK’s largest low cost online travel agents. They are part of the dnata Travel Group and the Emirates Group, providing holidays, hotels, flights, attractions and travel extras.

THE PROBLEM

SOLUTION

Design Process

Discovery

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Travel Republic biggest competitors are “On the Beach”, luckily they don’t offer this kind of service that TR aims to create for their users, this would help to uplift TR from our main competition.

But other bigger name in the travel industry offers a similar app, called “MyThompson”, Thompson offers an app where users can manage your bookings, keep a mobile version of the boarding passes, hotel & destination guide and a holiday countdown, therefore, many of the features TR would like to offer too.

Other apps with features that must be considered are:

Tripit – An app the convert all your bookings in a simple itinerary
Citymapper – Public transport planning itinerary.
XE Currency – For international exchange rates.
Tripadvisor –Help you to plan your trip and world-famous for reviews.

Weather

Daily forecast on the dashboard
Extended forecast

Destination Guide

Menu categories
Map visualisation

Checklist

Packing List
To-do list
Quick links/additional info
Cross-sell
Personalisation

Travel Tips

Itinerary
Notifications

Airport Vouchers

Discount codes
Special deals

Exchange Rate

USER RESEARCH

For the user research interviews, I wanted to do 1 to 1 qualitative interview hypothesis. 4 completely different profiles of travellers to define different behaviours and needs.

The profiles were:

Single
A young couple (20-35 years old)
Family with young kids (0-10 years old)
Family with teens (10-18 years old)

A script for the research question was created to trace the traveller's profile and understand their routine and needs before going on holiday.

Define

PERSONAS

With the information provided by the interviews, 4 pilot personas were created based on their profile and behaviour.

Understanding their characteristics, goals, frustrations, motivations and personality was an important fact to create these personas.

Profiles

Persona 1 - Single: Madalena Smith
Persona 2 - Young Couple: Stella Simonet
Persona 3 - Family with young kids: Joanne Franks
Persona 4 - Family with teen kids: Rupert Jones

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

Ideate

APP JOURNEY

The affinity diagram allowed me to visualise all the important items described by the travellers I interviewed.

I was then able to create an app journey to understand what information could be in which screens, and based on this second diagram it was easier to sketch the initial wireframes.

To fit in the timeframe available, I decided to focus only on the after booking stage until the airport for this project.

WIREFRAMES

As the solo designer in this project, I had the freedom to create wireframes as sketches based on results of the user's interviews.

Wireframes were sketched with pencil and paper based on the app journey and used as a reference to create the mockups.

Prototype

MOCK UPS

PROTOTYPE

The prototype was created in Invision.

User Testing

TESTING & EVALUATION

The prototype testing was made with 2 of the people I interviewed and used their profile to create the personas. I was able to have the “Single” and “Family with young kids” back to test the final prototype and understand if the first version of the app met the requirements discovered in the interviews.

Recording the testing, I required the users to follow a journey. These were a few of the steps in the test:

1 - You want to sign in

2 - You want to check your checklist for your next holiday

3 - You have applied for your visa and got medications needed

4 - You want to add a copy of your friend’s passport

5 - You want to check more information about your destination

6 - You want to check your itinerary

7 - You want to check your flight info

8 - You want to go to the homepage

TESTING CONCLUSION

Users were happy with the look and feel, and overall app.

The first user had little difficulty with the prototype as she thought it was a high fidelity prototype. But after understanding that only one journey was clickable, she navigated through the app easily following the directions and was happy to see in the app the information she provided during the user research.

She also suggested a few wordings as she found some of the titles in the app confusing.

The second user was observing the whole interface in detail, she wanted to make sure all the relevant information she needed to organise her trip was available on the app. She was happy with the overall app.

Conclusion

As Users were happy with the look and feel, and overall app. These findings and concepts were presented and well received by stakeholders, Product Owners and Developers.

The next step was to implement all the feedbacks in the design, plan the deliverables of this first MVP for development and create new features if necessary.