UX DESIGN

Desk Research
User interviews
Modelling a Persona
Empathy Map
User Journey Map
Wireframing
UI Design

I started my work with getting to know the travel habits of Polish people. After reading the latest travel planning reports, I found out about the most popular holiday destinations, the form of travel, the holiday planning period and future trends. According to the Accor report from 2021, more and more people value environmental awareness and conscious travel. The covid pandemic also showed them the importance of flexibility in travel planning.

The results of the trends for the future told me the direction in which I should follow. But I knew that reports were not enough. These types of interviews are conducted on a very wide group of people and what I need is information about a specific target group, which are middle-class people, aged 20 to 40, with a holiday budget of PLN 5000/6000.

In order to be sure of the choice of direction, or the decision to change it, I conducted interviews with the focus group of 5 people from large cities (2 women and 3 men), with an average age from 28 to 33 years. I found these people on Facebook groups. I asked them questions about the trip planning process and their best and worst experiences. To create a persona for my product, I made an unit analysis and then a cluster analysis. To my surprise, all the answers of the respondents were similar, so when creating the main persona there was no need to create a side one. My respondents avoid using travel agencies because they feel it limits them in so many vacation planning options. And yet everyone wants to spend them in the best possible way. On the other hand, each of them indicated that they would not reject this form of planning a trip if it only offered more flexibility or if were more suited to their needs. It sounded encouraging.

Creating an Empathy Map with such consistent answers was not a difficult process and it helped me determine the functionality of my product at the same time.
Moving on to the competitor market, I noticed that there are practically no such travel agencies in Poland. They are all communicated to a mass audience. The only direct competition is the Slowhop portal, which was mentioned in the interviews as a model, but which offers accommodation only in Europe. It also does not offer a transport function, which would be a great help for many "slow users". These and other considerations led me to a unique value proposition.

Business goals

Impact Map

I had no major problems with Touchpoints for my product as well, because during the interviews I asked respondents about their paths of planning and gathering information. This led me to a nice conclusion that the interview script was well prepared, which made my work enormously easier. Finally, by creating an Impact Map, I visualized user experiences.

The scope of work for the above task ends with the Impact Map (it was created as part of the UX/UI Academy course). However, considering how big gap exists in the market of modern travel agencies, I believe it is worth exploring further. It would be vital for this product to create MVP and develop a business model. This type of travel agency, focused on quality rather than quantity, is certainly not dedicated to mass recipients, but the demand for such services is constantly and rapidly growing. The needs of a minority of users should not be overlooked, hoping that someday they will be in majority. Nevertheless, I have decided to propose a few UI designs based on the knowledge I have acquired so far, I had started with Wireframes and then went to final high fidelity designs.

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To be continued

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