Virtuoso’s luxury trips are tailor-made by travel experts, offering a very personalized experience for each person. My design challenge was to answer the following question in the form of a new Virtuoso-branded mobile app:

What would a trip management feature look like?

Project Type
Mobile iOS App

Role
Researcher, UX/UI Designer

Skills
Research, Product Roadmap, UX/UI Design, User Testing

Duration
Four weeks (2020)

Research

Primary Research

I conducted remote user interviews to help discover motivations, habits, and pain points that contribute to a positive or negative travel experience.

• Users need all of their confirmations and reservations in one place.

• Users want rapid responses from their agent.

• Users need control over their activities and destinations.

Secondary Research

Identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses through competitive analysis, and overall trends and actionable data with market research.

• Millennial’s desire for convenience may drive up the use of agents.

• Younger generations expect mobile convenience and a refined customer experience.

• Agents can do more to demonstrate their value by promoting discounts and being transparent with pricing.

• Combining the expertise of an agent with the convenience of a mobile app may be a sweet spot for many users.

Define

After creating a persona based on my research, a customer journey map tracked multiple aspects of a user’s path from browsing trips to traveling to post-trip, and presented opportunities for the role of the app in this process.

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User flows helped me assess existing processes and how to add valuable features in a touchscreen format.

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Design

Sketches helped me get ideas out quickly, and to consider the actions a user would take on each screen, and where they could be placed. I included interaction notes to demonstrate functionality that could not be drawn.

After benchmarking some other apps, I chose a general design direction from those initial sketches. Building these allowed me to see the actual size of elements on the screen, and to make additional sizing and spacing considerations.

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Wireframe Testing

It was important to test my wireframes with users before any final design decisions were made. Using remotely-moderated testing, I had the opportunity to see how other people used the app and find opportunities for improvement.

LAUNCH PROTOTYPE

Tasks:

• Send a message to your agent

• Find reviews on the cafe you plan to visit

• Look up your flight info for tomorrow

• Start planning your trip for next year

• Figure out what the plan is for day four of your trip

Results:

• Users demonstrated understanding of how critical trip information is organized.

• Users may search for locations via the itinerary, not the map.

• There is more that can be done with the final product to leverage interactivity and intelligently populating certain content in certain places.

• Need more benchmarking to decide where to place “Start new trip” button.

High-Fidelity Designs

After sketching, wireframing, and testing, it was time to build the high-fidelity UI design.

Testing

After the high fidelity designs were complete, it was time to test them. I created an interactive prototype using Invision, created tasks for users to complete, and received feedback with remotely-moderated sessions.

LIVE PROTOTYPE

These tests didn’t go how I expected, but provided some great insight into how people might use this app. The most common hangup was viewing a location on the map. Some people went to the map, and some to the itinerary. In either case, clear paths need to be developed so the user knows what to expect. 

Users were easily able to find the past trip, and the reviews for Croatia Cafe. Most people weren’t sure if the Upcoming trip card was actionable, so adding a cta (primary or secondary) may help to clarify. Also, removing the three-dot button. 

Overall people liked the visual design, users said it was readable and comfortable. The biggest issue was navigation. When I built the prototype, I didn’t anticipate all the paths that a user could take to get to the same place, so this has been a good lesson in empathy and the importance of testing!

Design Revisions

Based on my user feedback from testing, I made a few design and navigation changes to the app.

Using cards - The Explore tab didn’t group information together effectively, and provided minimal value to the user when skimming. Using cards to group the information helped to both visually distinguish groups of info, but also allowed for more granular detail per item.

Map navigation - Users found the map controls confusing, both in whether they were actionable, or where they went. I attempted to simplify both the controls and the look and feel to reduce confusion.

Trip overview card - Updates here included adding a share action, which a couple users mentioned would be helpful to them. I also placed all the points of interest from the itinerary on the map for an “at-a-glance” view, and removed all extraneous information.

Conclusion

Being a traveler myself, I felt motivated to get the details of this project right. There are many areas that I would want to continue to explore, such as the agent chat feature, and how a user would create a new trip with an agent. I enjoyed the challenge of designing for the touchscreen. I could not depend on things like hover states, and navigation is handled differently than on the desktop. Adding a feature to an existing brand also kept me sensitive to the visual language of the company while keeping in mind their business goals.