Expedia Last Minute App
Stand alone mobile application for a concept brief
Introduction
Expedia is one of the world’s leading full-service online travel brands helping travellers to easily plan and book travel from the widest selection of vacation packages, flights, hotels, rental cars, rail, cruises, activities, attractions, and services.
The Brief
To design a stand-alone app focused on booking last-minute trip deals from mobile devices.
Team: Myself, Sam Awad, Mungo Tatton-Brown
& Gabriela-Loredana Tepes
Design Sprint: 2 Week Sprint
Role: Research | UX | UI Designer
Tools Used
Sketch, Illustrator, InVision, Photoshop,
Discovery
Some initial things to consider
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How do last minute travellers currently plan and coordinate their bookings?
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What are the pain points travellers have when booking last minute travel?
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What do users expect when they are booking last minute trips?
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What criteria and expectations does a traveller have when researching, planning, and booking a last minute trip?
User Interviews
We created an online survey to reach out to our perspective audience to get more of an insight as to who would be best to interview. We then selected interviewees to delve deeper into their travel planning habits. I interviewed 5 out of the 14 people we selected.
During the interviews, I also conducted an observation where I asked them to pick a travel planning app based on our competitive research. I then asked them to follow some simple research and booking tasks to help us find out exactly what our users pain points are and how we could improve the whole booking experience.
Key Quotes:
Hannah
“I sometimes find too much information overwhelming”
Divya
“I often book last minute flights somewhere hot to escape
the London weather”
Victoria
“Usually I book flights and accommodation separately, it works out to be cheaper”
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Most research was conducted on a website or tablet
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Booking last minute required more inspiration
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Flights and Accommodation were booked separately
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Sharing trip information with others is a pain point
Key Themes
Some of the key themes that I noticed from the interviews and observations were as follows:
Key Pain Points
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Cost
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Information overload
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Number of options available
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Length of booking process
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Coordinating a group booking over whatsapp or email
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Changing a booking was always traumatic
Holidays vs Family
Last minute trips happened for two reasons. Either to go on holiday, or to see family when something had happened. Mostly people went on last-minute holidays to get away, so that would be the focus of our scenarios.
Traveling Solo vs Group Bookings
Booking last minute trips usually meant
traveling solo or in a small group of no more
than 4. Usually due to the long research process
and sharing info amongst the group.
How people differed
Competitive Research
Lastminute.com
Lastminute.com have a colourful app with simple streamlined features and functions. They are Expedia’s main competitors considering their whole site is dedicated to last minute trips.
Skyscanner
Although SkyScanner are mainly used for flight comparison also offer a last minute section called this weekend. They also have a nice clean and simple app with an added bonus feature of a colour coded calendar, that allows you to pick flight dates based on price.
We didn’t stop there, we also looked at Kayak who are relatively new on the scene but also have some really nice features.
Define
Personas
Based on our interviews and observations, we created two personas to begin with as our customers booking habits varied based on the type of trip they were looking to book. Some people preferred desktop and some were quite happy booking last minute on apps.
After a big discussion on which persona would be best to help us focus on the last minute aspect of our app, we decided that Davina should be the main persona. We then came up with the following Scenario for Davina to take into the Design Studio.
Develop
Design Studio
A few key things for us to focus on were:
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Users want a product that is quick and easy to compare flight information.
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Being able to share the booking details with friends they were travelling with was also a key priority.
Current apps and websites haven’t managed to tackle this successfully.
This lead us to decide to focus on an inspiration app with an innovative sharing feature.
Davina’s Scenario
Davina wants to go on a last-minute return trip with her friend Lucy this weekend. Using the Expedia Last Minute app, she finds a flight she’d like to go on and shares the details with her.
The app then sends Lucy a request to select which flight options suit her best. Davina then receives a notification on which flights Lucy has agreed to. Davina then books their flights using the Expedia Last Minute app.
Experience Mapping
Throughout our project we kept updating our experience map, tailoring it to make sure we were always focused on how Davina’s journey would look throughout using our app.
Prototyping and Testing
We conducted 12 users tests on paper before we moved to low-fidelity. After each round of testing we synthesised our results by writing down all our key findings onto post it notes as a group so we could learn how best to iterate the changes for the next level of fidelity.
Key changes:
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Showing outbound and inbound flights separately
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Implemented a date slider and price filter
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For returning customers their default city would be their home town to save time
Paper to Mid Fidelity
Sharing a flight
Key Quotes:
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“These screens are confusing and long winded” Josh
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“How do I alter my dates easily?” Henry
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“I’ve gone through all these screens and still haven’t shared my trip” Callum
We simplified and condensed the original 5 screens down to 2 simple screens as you can see below.
Booking a flight
Key Quote:
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“ I don’t know my friends passenger details though, or their passport number”
Instead of manually inputting your friends details, the app requests and stores passenger information with all parties you shared the trip with, allowing the main organiser to simply select the passenger information saved and adding appropriate baggage required to the booking before proceeding.
Expedia Branding
With such a strong and popular brand that everyone recognises within the travel market, we were very conscious about maintaining such a dominant style for our last minute app.
Our Style Guide Additions
To differentiate our last-minute app from their existing travel app, we used rounded buttons, toggle switches, colour gradients, round edges rectangles and we changed their logo, Expedia have ad on logo’s for different parts of their current website.
Deliver
High Fidelity Screens
InVision Prototype Link
You can view the final, high fidelity clickable prototype on InVision here.
In the mock-up, Davina looks for last minute flights for herself and her friend Lucy this weekend. She then shares the flight information with Lucy.
Then Lucy sends back her preferred flight choice and Davina then books the flights using the supplied passenger details within the app.
Conclusion
One of the biggest lessons I learned in this group project was to not get too attached to our first idea and not to be afraid to pivot and start all over again. Also working with strong personalities meant that discussions took longer so we had to be more strict by time boxing to make sure we progressed forward to enable us to meet the strict deadlines.
I am most proud of how we delivered an app solution that travellers enjoyed using. The unique sharing feature was commented on by everyone asking when our app would be available to use. Maybe I should contact Expedia directly to see if they will take on our concept idea.
Thank you for reading.
Click here if you would like to view my full case study on Medium.
Next Steps
Based on our findings from user testing, some other changes we would like to implement into the next round of iterations would be:
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Shareable Favourites lists
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Fare splitting between passengers
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Easy editing within the app
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Improving search Filters