Wanderlux Travel
A luxury travel booking app for the boujee millennial on a budget.
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Overview
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Timeline: 6 Months
Tools: Figma, Optimal Workshop, Milanote, Google Forms
The Problem
It all started when I realized that as a Millennial traveler, I could not find a single app where I could search a wide range of flexible dates to find a good deal on a luxury trip. As someone who enjoys luxury travel, but also wants to save money, I am usually open to traveling whenever the best deal is available, rather than searching for a specific range of dates. I became frustrated with always having to enter a date range in order to generate search results, when in reality I was not confined to any specific date range.
I decided to embark on a user research journey to find out if other millennials felt the same frustration. My work focused on end-to-end qualitative research to learn the motivations, behaviors, preferences, and pain points for millennial travelers to facilitate the design of a one-of-a-kind travel booking app. I designed wireframes, high fidelity mockups, and a functioning prototype to utilize for my in-depth research.
This project is my capstone for Springboard’s UX Design career track.
Secondary Research
I began my qualitative research process with a competitive analysis, and found that most travel booking websites for hotels/resorts and flights were not offering the features that I was looking for. I selected three popular travel websites to compare across three heuristics. I discovered that Airbnb does offer a more flexible search, but this website is for rentals, not resorts, so it was not included in my heuristic analysis.
Expedia:
Aesthetic & Minimalist Design: Simple website, lack of color, distracting amount and size of advertisements, overall feeling of clutter.
Flexibility & Efficiency of Use: Flexible dates feature allows user to look at 3 days before and after their current search, but no ability to search a broader range of time.
Consistency and Standards: The redundant “more travel” drop down shows the same functions shown on the home screen. Overall consistent with other travel websites and easy to locate key features.
Booking.com:
Aesthetic & Minimalist Design: Clean and simple design that is consistent on each page of the site. There are no ads cluttering the page. The colors are simple and consistent.
Flexibility & Efficiency of Use: No option to view flexible dates or multiple locations at once.
Consistency and Standards: Common functions consistent with standards.
Travelocity:
Aesthetic & Minimalist Design: Fun colorful aesthetic, but home page is cluttered.
Flexibility & Efficiency of Use: Similar to Expedia, you can view prices for 3 days before and 3 days after the departure/arrival dates you’ve selected, but no option to view a broader range of dates.
Consistency and Standards: Overall consistent with other travel websites and easy to locate key features.
Primary Research
Once I had this background information, I set out to conduct primary research. I began with a screener survey to find participants that met certain criteria:
Millennial (age 24-48)
Travels at least once a year by plane
Books their own travel on web or mobile apps
Moderate to high travel budget
From the screener, I identified 5 participants that met my criteria and were willing to participate in a remote interview. The interviews took place over Zoom and were approximately 30 minutes each. The goal of the interviews was to find out:
What websites are they currently using to book travel
What do they like/dislike about their current travel booking process?
What additional features are they looking for in a travel booking site?
An affinity map was created to show common themes and patterns from the user interviews. From the interviews, the common categories I found were:
Time & Effort
Convenience
Transparency
Reviews
Price
Flexibility
Booking preference
Following the interviews, I synthesized my findings with an empathy map to demonstrate what a user would say, think, feel, and do when booking a luxury trip on a budget. For example, one of the participants:
Said- “ It’s too time consuming.”
Thought- “This should be easier.”
Felt- Frustrated
Did- Abandons search
Using insights from the affinity and empathy mapping, I was able to find common themes among my target users to create one user persona that accurately portrays my participants
Sketching & Wireframing
Once I had my target user in mind, I started bringing my ideas to life with paper sketches and guerilla testing. This allowed me to detect problems early on prior to creating wireframes. I then started on low-fidelity wireframes on Figma and created a wireflow depicting the user flow of booking a new trip within the app.
This wireflow depicts an end to end user journey while booking a new trip on the app.
UI Design
Once the initial user research has been conducted, I created a mood board to build UI inspiration for my upcoming high-fidelity designs. I choose greens, golds, and light pinks based on inspiration pictures that I found upon searching luxury travel photos.
High Fidelity Mockups
With my mood board and style guide in mind, I used my wireframes to create first iterations of high fidelity mockups on Figma, which were then made into a functioning prototype.
Usability Testing
An initial prototype was made from the first iteration of high fidelity designs and tested with 5 participants. Each moderated usability test lasted 20-30 minutes and was conducted in person, or remotely via zoom. The first round of usability testing uncovered 7 problems to be addressed with the upcoming second iterations.
The main usability issues uncovered in round 1 of usability testing were:
Users not knowing where to start their search to look for a specific region (ie. Caribbean)
Difficulty finding where to input travel dates during search
Unclear labeling of buttons during hotel search
Second Iterations
With the feedback gathered from my first round of user testing, I moved on to create second high fidelity iterations to solve the problems that were uncovered during usability testing.
A second round of usability testing was performed with 5 new participants. This round of testing uncovered less problems than the first round, but showed that a few of the core problems were still not properly solved.
Users still unclear where to begin search
Difficulty selecting date range for search
Users would like to narrow their search after they searched across a general region
Key Insights
Millennials are busy and want a quick and efficient experience
Millennials highly value transparency of travel websites
Quality is just as important as price, and millennials want websites with reviews, photos, and rating systems that they can trust
Most Important Qualities of a Travel Booking App: Transparency, Trust, Convenience, Quality, Price, Flexibility
Conclusion
After 2 rounds of usability testing, it became clear that the app prototype still requires more iterations to fix key usability problems. This project was conducted as a capstone project for Springboard’s online UX bootcamp. Therefore, this placed limitations on what I was able to achieve based off of time constraints. I also lacked the resources of a large company, and was working under a set curriculum and timeline. If this were a real-life project, I would recommend another round of iterations and testing to solve the remaining problems. I would have also preferred to use a formal usability testing website rather than recruiting from social media and my personal network, but did not have the resources. For future research, it would be interesting to see how this would apply to different age groups.
Thank you for reading along, and please feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback!