PROJECT: Expedia Capstone
ROLE: Designer, Researcher
RESPONSIBILITIES: Interviewing, Affinity Mapping, Wireframing, UI design, Figma Prototyping, User Testing
OVERVIEW:
For my senior capstone, I worked on a team of four HCDE students, sponsored by Expedia, to research and redesign the Trips page on their mobile app. This project was comprised of research, design, and testing phases.
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
The Trips page on the Expedia app enables users to keep track of their plans and travel information made with Expedia by displaying tickets and reservations in one places. Our problem focus was exploring how we could reimagine and redesign this service to better support group travel and prepare users for their upcoming trip.
PROCESS:
We utilized preliminary research provided by Expedia and surveys, interviews, and field observations conducted by our team to produce four recommendations to direct our design phase. We identified these recommendations by aggregating and affinity mapping our research data on FigJam.
The four recommendations:
– Include features like itinerary planning and price comparison in travel apps to give users complete tools for planning and booking trips.
– Improve travel apps by refining layout, navigation, and overall user experience to reduce confusion and simplify booking.
– Increase pricing transparency in travel apps by offering clear cost breakdowns, comparison tools for flights and accommodations, and alerts for hidden fees.
– Add collaborative trip planning features to travel apps, like shared itineraries, group chat, and real-time collaboration tools for easier decision-making.
Leveraging these recommendations, we cycled through wireframing, low-fidelity prototyping, and mid-fidelity prototyping until we took our Figma prototype to the Expedia Headquarters to carry out in-person testing in their research lab. From this user testing, we analyzed our research data to refine our design as we transformed it into our high-fidelity prototype. This high-fidelity prototype was presented at our capstone showcase as the culmination of our six-month research and design period.
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KEY FEATURES:
The final high-fidelity prototype included three key features based on our research recommendations. First, a redesigned Trip Summary page allowed detailed itinerary planning with a sleek, user-friendly layout.
Second, a dynamic Budget tool showed trip expenses for better financial tracking.
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Lastly, we added a chat feature to the Trips page for seamless planning and collaboration without needing other platforms. Prototyping the chat feature was one of my responsiblities and I wanted to incorporate multiple tools into the design that could facilitate decision making and be used to improve collaboration and efficiency.
TAKEAWAYS:
This project gave my team the opportunity to conduct professional-level user research, and it helped me refine my approach as a researcher to understand how people interact with technology. While we had a testing script, I often deviated to explore a user's decision-making process before returning to the script. These moments helped us better understand how to make our interfaces more intuitive.
CONCLUSION & KUDOS:
Over six months of research, design, prototyping, and testing, this project gave me invaluable experience in fully engaging with each stage of the design process. It helped me grow as both a researcher and designer. A big thank you to my teammates for their creativity and hard work, Expedia for their mentorship and sponsorship, and our capstone professors and TAs for their guidance and support throughout the journey.
Video Protoype Here!