Traveling without a destination?

Challenge:

As its own initiative, business proposed a new product on the website. A travel destination search engine for those customers who were undecided, but had some time to travel and knew their budget.

Thus a new product (that will be called FF from now on) was born. A tool for travelers who want to discover new places, or for those who simply want to escape and disconnect, no matter much where.

Kick-off meeting: In our first meeting the stakeholder made it clear that regardless of what we learn from the user research, we would design and develop a product MVP. Given the urgency to get it on the air quickly, both the design and the research were started simultaneously as per stakeholder's request.

The PO accepted this approach with the idea of working in future iterations to refine FF.

For this project a PO, two UX/UI designers, one UX researcher and the Head of design also participated.

Once I understood the problem FF was going to solve, I set out the research questions with my team and got thumbs up from all of them. Here are the questions:

• What do we know about our customers, what are their travel habits, who is this product aimed at?

• In what situations would customers consider using this product?

• What are the factors that customers consider when using this product?

• What are the factors that customers consider when deciding where to travel?

• When do they start planning their travel?

• How far in advance do they book?

Research plan:

Execution of plan:

The first step was to do a desk research. I found a couple of quantitative and qualitative research conducted for VISITENGLAND in 2013, where I collected some data on traveler behaviors. However, this research was done 10 years ago and in only one market; so the next step was to confirm their validity today and in the rest of the markets.

Simultaneously, I requested the Insights team:

- basic booking flow metrics,

- proportion of users who, within a short period of time (2 or 3 days), make repeated flight searches selecting different destinations [customers with undefined destination].

- proportion of users who made a direct booking in a single session, without changing destination or dates [customers with defined destination].

- conversions rates when this behavior occurred.

Having all this data, I created and launched a survey in which I not only kept some of the relevant questions of previous studies found during the desk research stage, but I delved into other topics of interest and prepared a semi-structured interview script with follow-up questions when applicable.

The screening of participants for both the interview and the survey was balanced,

using equal numbers of decided-destination and undecided-destination customers.

Limitations:

-Reliance on CRM to send interview and online survey invitations delayed the process.

-Absence of incentives to participants made recruitment difficult and resulted in no-shows.

Results:

Once all the information was collected and analyzed, I made a report listing all the overall conclusions and findings obtained with each of the data collection methods. This report included 2 customer persona that I was able to define as the final outcome, and a roadmap that synthesized the stages of vacation trip planning, with pain points, prevalent feelings and touchpoints in digital sources of information.

The research results helped to define FF's filters and search flights options. Data showed that a particular age group of customers, were more likely to pre-book third-party services like transport options available on their destination. I sent this data to the marketing team so they would work on bundles, promos and special sales we could offer to these type of customer through email comms, and/or directly on FF in a short-term future; so to encourage cross-selling.

Filters adapted to customer needs

As planned, these bundles and promos were integrated into FF in subsequent iterations and tested with users. I detected findability issues and mismatch between customer expectations on the FF access points and the concept we were trying to communicate. The entry points to FF were multiple, but they were concentrated in a single component, although in different buttons that led the user to the same page.

The project is currently ongoing and we are working on brainstorming sessions within the team to find potential solutions to the problems we are encountering along the way.

[Deliverables are confidential and cannot be published in this portfolio]