Optimising the booking process for a fictitious airline app (Sep 2020 - Mar 2021)

The problem

During my UX Design Institute Professional UX Diploma course we needed to solve a problem for a fictive client. The client is a start-up airline called Fly UX. They’re looking to create an online experience that is fast, easy, and intuitive: one that’s based on a deep understanding of their target users.

Role and responsibilities

During the course, my role as UX Designer allowed me to have individual responsibilities during the hands-on projects, which were: competitive reviews, online survey, observing a user test, conducting an interview and user test, affinity diagramming, customer journey mapping, user flows, sketching screens and screen states, prototyping, and wireframing.

Research

I performed competitive reviews for five competitive airline apps. In addition, I conducted an online survey and I observed two usability tests. We ended the research phase by conducting an interview and two user tests with one participant.

A participant trying to complete a booking process on one of the airline apps.

Analysis

Once the research was done, I analysed the collected raw data using affinity diagramming. The affinity diagram allowed me to group the data into phases to get a better idea of where these problems occurred, and to prepare my alignment diagram such as a Customer Journey Map.

A Customer Journey Map as a deliverable to map out the pain points and behaviour in each phase of the booking process.
A screenshot of the end result of my affinity diagram activity in Miro.

Design

I started by designing an ideal user flow to get the necessary interactions in place. Then I drew all the screens and screenstates for the booking process on paper. I went through the paper sketches by mimicking the user flows’ interactions with my fingers and taking pictures of them as I went along.

Here you can see six of the 56 sketches I made to design the first screens and screens states after I defined the ideal user flow for the Fly UX booking process.

Prototype

I designed a medium fidelity prototype. This form of fidelity was exactly right for what we wanted to learn if we wanted to test our solution iteratively by users.

A screenshot of my XD file. I used the Material Design system to design the medium fidelity prototype to get a lot of details right from the start.

Challenges I faced

I was lucky that at that time I was already working as a UX Designer on an exciting project for the federal government at iO. Therefore, due to time constraints, I was not able to carry out a usability test of my solution for this project. I can only assume that my solution solved at least some of the problems I found during the research.

What I learned and what I’d improve

If this was a request from a client in the real world, I would start with a discovery phase, because there are too many unknowns. Before I would do any of the above work, I would try to figure out these unknowns with the client. If the client is not able to fill in all the gaps, I would set up discovery goals and a good problem statement together with them, so that we have a concrete focus and scope for research we can rely on to find out whether or not improving the booking process would be the best solution.