My first mini-project was based on a super simple question: How can the process of purchasing airline tickets be improved?
I approached three people (yes, very small sample space just for practice!) to interview them on recent experiences purchasing airline tickets and used their feedback to come up with three ways to redesign key aspects of the purchasing process.
Research - User Interviews
During these brief interviews (15-20 minutes?), I mainly used some simple prompts I borrowed from other case studies online, catered to this topic of interest:
When and where do you go to purchase airline tickets?
What are your main objectives when purchasing airline tickets?
Are there any pain points during your experiences purchasing airline tickets?
What’s an idea you have to improve the experience?
Synthesis - Seasoned Traveler Persona
From these three participants, the “Seasoned Traveler” persona was born! This person just wants the cheapest flights for all parties involved in a specified time frame and with the least inconvenience.
My redesign ideas were based very directly on the information I got from my three participants.
Multiple Origin Flight Comparison
One participant noted that she has friends living in different cities across the country, and they go on trips together regularly - all flying to the same destination from different origins! That said, everyone's on a budget and her friends are happy to compromise with dates if it means the trip becomes more economical for others within the group. With this added comparison feature, it's easy to identify the best option for everyone without scheduling long video chats to discuss travel dates!
Added Credit Card Point Payment Type
More than one participant in my tiny study mentioned the added inconvenience of paying with credit card points, especially when travel buddies don't have the same point systems! This redesign element would allow users to purchase flights using any type of credit card points they have.
Airport Crowd Notification
An inconvenience all airline travelers face is airport crowds. This redesign idea would provide travelers with insight into the airport crowd to expect before a flight option. For example, users booking flights around the holidays would get the added notification that certain flight times would draw large crowds at the airport. If the Seasoned Traveler decided that he or she did not want to deal with long security lines, another flight could be chosen instead.
I also asked two participants for their feedback about these redesign ideas. In general, they responded positively to them and gave me more food for thought on how to improve on these ideas.
Closing Thoughts and Takeaways
This was admittedly a simple UX exercise run mainly for myself. In the future, I hope for a larger sample size and to demonstrate the redesign elements in a more sophisticated way. In the above visuals and the slides I put together for this project, lack of experience really shows with my attempts to wireframe (if you can call it that lol) in PowerPoint. Hopefully they got the points across anyway!
Reading UX case studies in my spare time! And trying to learn Adobe XD since Sketch and InVision are for Macs only (sad). Hmm... A good MacOS emulator may be in order.
