Project 4: The Passion Project
THE BRIEF
Explore a problem/area of opportunity for an existing brand. Start exploring and working with technical constraints.
- Draft a project proposal.
- Choose an appropriate platform.
- Develop a project plan.
- Present it to a small audience.
Time to complete: 2 weeks.
THE TEAM
From the moment we kicked off our first meeting, we knew we all had one main thing in common: traveling! So, it only made sense to choose traveling as our passion project and to call ourselves — Team Wanderlust!
ROLES
- Me: Project Manager
- Sherry: UX Designer
- Christina: UX Designer
PROJECT PROPOSAL/PLAN
Our first step was to come up with a problem that travelers faced when booking travels, and then find a brand to solve that problem. After a long brainstorming session, we eventually agreed to propose this to the management team:
The Problem
Travelers who do not have the time or energy to plan a trip want prearranged travel on a budget.
The Brand
The Priceline Group had $55.5 billion in gross bookings in 2015 and is the world leader in online travel and related services. Their mission? To help people experience the world. Priceline.com currently offers flights, hotels, cars, and cruises, but do not offer pre-planned packages/itineraries with activities.
The Opportunity
Some travelers don’t like planning and others don’t have the time. We want to create a prearranged itinerary app for Priceline.com on Android for the on-the-go traveler. Itineraries include: flight, hotels, transportation, and suggested tours and are based on the traveler’s interests, budgets, travel dates, etc. We want to call it: The Travel Genie.
Platform Selection
The Priceline Travel Genie will be a native app developed for Android to allow people to plan and manage their travel itinerary on the go. Android is the most widely used mobile platform in the world, and as of December 2015 comprised nearly 60% of mobile sales in the United States. An app for Android will reach the largest market of consumers for Priceline.
Estimated Timeline & Schedule
To track our progress and to keep ourselves in check, we used a Gantt chart:
RESEARCH
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We wanted to find out what our competitors were doing, and we wanted to do it better. We identified the competitors through a business research tool — Hoover’s (no, I’m not talking about the vacuum cleaner). Hoover’s is an American business research company that maintains a database of over 85 million companies. Priceline’s direct competitors were: Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz.
We decided to focus on the products that were offered outside the scope of flights, hotels, and car rentals, since our goal was to come up with a new product for Priceline.
From our comparison chart, we found that all 3 competitors offered activities, but Priceline did not. This was an opportunity for Priceline to create a product that inspired its customers to travel more often and provided a one stop shop for flights, hotels, cars, and activities.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
It was important to look at other travel apps (indirect competitors) in the market as well to conduct a comparative analysis. We used a chart to track features we thought were pretty awesome and wrote a snip bit of how it could help with our future design.
Once we got more information on our brand/competitors, we moved on to user research to validate our problem statement.
TRAVEL SCREENER/SURVEY
We started our user research by sending out a detailed travel screener to GA and our personal networks to find out more about people and their travel behaviors. To weed out people not in our demographic (non-travelers), we specified that only people who have traveled should fill out the screener.
We’ve gotten a total of 64 responses. Of the 64, only ~47% took the lead in organizing their travel plans. This meant that ~53% relied solely on others to organize their travel plans. More than half of the respondents booked their travels through a travel website, which was great news for Priceline!
USER INTERVIEWS & PERSONAS
We invited some of our respondents in to get a more in depth response on their responses and created an interview script to guide us:
In total, we conducted 10 user interviews, as a team as well as on our own (divided & conquered!). From our initial user interviews, we found that most people didn’t plan trips because they just didn’t have the time from busy work schedules or because they were too lazy to.
The demographic of our users were:
- Age Range: 20’s-60’s
- Gender: 40% Male; 60% Female
- % of U.S. Citizens: 70%
- % of Non U.S. Citizens: 30%
(We wanted to find out if where people were from determined people’s travel behaviors. From our interviews, the non-U.S. citizens traveled leisurely more often per year than U.S. citizens did. Those who were born and raised in the U.S. seemed to travel out of the country less frequently and traveled more often for business.)
We affinity mapped our data and synthesized it by grouping similar behaviors and attitudes together. Our findings revealed three attitudes toward prearranged/package travel that we used as core values for the construction of our personas:
- Spontaneous Globetrotter: Never books packages; allergic to planning.
- Grandma on the Go: Books packages almost exclusively; feels like they are a good value and likes the convenience of having knowledgable guides.
- Busy Young Professional: Occasionally, books packages for retreats/adventure travel, but questions their value/quality and prefers the flexibility (but not the effort) of planning her own itineraries.
Want to learn more about our personas? Check them out here:
We chose Julia and Marcie as our primary users because we felt they would be the ones who would get the most out of our app. However, we will keep Oleg in mind in case he ever decided to change his mind and actually wanted to start planning his trips.
TECHNICAL RESEARCH
Our team did not have any kind of technical background, so we definitely struggled a bit with the technical research report. However, we pulled through and with validation from some GA developers, here were some API’s we had discovered that we could use in our app:
- Priceline offered an API for web and mobile applications that provided data on rates and availability for flights, hotels, rental cars, and combination packages. This would be used in the Travel Genie to link existing reservations to users’ itineraries and to purchase new flights/hotels/rental cars within the app for new trips.
- Google Maps Directions API provided location data and step by step directions. This would be used in the Travel Genie’s activities pages to give users a map of the area they would be visiting.
- Additional APIs and Android Studio resources could be implemented to detect and troubleshoot coding issues.
We also wanted to include some interactions in the app that followed Android’s standards. Interactions included:
- Offline Itineraries: Maps, Routing and Search functionality can run offline on Android applications with SDK download. This would allow users to access their itineraries and information about their chosen activities while traveling abroad without access to wifi or data.
- Swipe to Perform: In Android, (i.e. Gmail), swiping a message would have immediately archived it. This would be an example of a swipe-to-perform gesture. Inline feedback would show that the message had been archived and would then offer an option to undo. Travel Genie users would be able to swipe right on activities in their itineraries to remove them from the list.
- Drag and Drop: The Android drag/drop framework permitted users to select options and change the order of these items within the same layout. This will be used in Travel Genie to change the order of events in an itinerary.
STYLE GUIDE
To keep the Priceline brand alive, we’ve studied their current Android app and found a few style guidelines:
DESIGN PROCESS
Once we got all our research together, we started the design ideation process.
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
We wrote down all the different features we believed our app should have and placed them on a feature prioritization chart based on ease of implementing and how essential it was.
We decided everything above the horizontal line was important and needed to be implemented in order to make the Travel Genie something consumers wanted to use.
APP MAP
Once we knew what features to add, we mapped out what it would look like.
SKETCH
We held a design studio session where we all diverged, critiqued, iterated/refined, and converged to come up with our screen layouts.
USER FLOWS
To demonstrate how our primary personas would walk through the app, we created user flows.
WIREFRAMES
We started with a medium fidelity wireframe template so that multiple designers can work and maintain that consistency.
Annotated wireframes:
USER TESTING/ITERATIONS
We created a script guide to user test. In total, we conducted 2 user tests due to to time constraints.
Here were some iterations inspired by user feedback:
PROTOTYPE
The latest version of the prototype can be found here:
NEXT STEPS
- We want consolidated feedback from all stakeholders.
- We want to conduct more user testing. We didn’t have time to test out the latest version of the prototype.
- We want business partnerships with organizations that provide a la carte tours and all-inclusive packages to expand Priceline’s offerings.
- We want to build a database of sites/attractions in all major tourist destinations and may want to consider partnering with Trip Hobo.
- If all goes well, let’s send this to the engineer team and get Travel Genie on the market!
