When planning for long term projects, building a design strategy aligned with business goals, and creating a timeline are essential. As a team, we conducted workshops to identify personas, and the users’ online booking journey. And to have a clear vision of ultimate goals, identify key challenges, and anticipate roadblocks, we utilized the UX Strategy Blueprint

Insights

Eliminating guesswork through research

Through research —incl. interviews, journey mapping, analytics data, benchmark analysis, and more— we found out data to feed the design process. But if “data” is  what we learned from the user research, “insights” are why we think that is the case.

Some of the prominent insights were;

• users may have a hard time choosing the airline due to booking flows not addressing a wide range of user needs,
• passengers’ feeling of “being deceived” because they see different prices on the checkout (added taxes, extra fees, etc…),
• increased workload of call centers agents because the passengers do not have access to clear and concise information regarding baggage rules and regulations
• and more…

Information Architecture

We’ve focused on information architecture (incl. searching, browsing, categorizing and presenting relevant content) to organize and label information in order to improve findability and discoverability

How might we provide a quicker & more intuitive navigation?

Through card sorting & tree testing exercises, we aimed to reveal users’ mental models regarding how they organize & label information, in order to help them find relevant information quickly, and complete their goals easily

How might we decrease the cognitive load in a complex environment?

As I’ve written in one of my articles, “User Flows” are user experience design artefacts that map out all the actions users can take to achieve a goal in your product or service. We can create a user flow diagram to:

• Describe the decisions of users in a system
• Demonstrate the logic flow of a whole product/service Simplify complicated processes and workflows
• Create a shared language among designers, developers, and project owners
• Speed up the experience design process by building as a base for other steps such as information architecture or user interface design

How might we let users find specific information faster?

Initially, one might think that “designing search” is easy. You just type stuff, and bam! Results. Right?… Well, I’ve found that it’s much more complex than it looks. As Baymard Institute states; “It’s important to recognize that returning a handful of highly relevant matches to the user’s search query isn’t enough.” If you want to craft a rich user experience, there are lots of details you have to pay attention to, such as;

• How many characters should the user type before seeing auto-suggestion results?
• Does your search system support symbols and abbreviations? (Airport abbreviations, size of baggage, etc…)
• What percentage of the users are conducting “exact searches” (e.g. “cabin-baggage allowance”), showing that they have a precise idea of what they’re seeking? Are they using shallow exploratory searches like “baggage” instead?
• and so on…

How might we ensure that users can find and engage with the right content at the right time?

As Wolfram Nagel explains in his article —Content Design and UI Mapping in a nutshell— “Content and user interfaces can be planned and assembled modularly and structured in a similar manner, comparable to bricks in a building block system. Content basically runs through three steps until it reaches its recipient: Gathering, management and output. A mapping has to occur at the intersections of these three steps.”

“What happens when I press on this?”

Initial paper sketches to make sense of the whole booking system and design the interactions

%7

increase in online bookings

%21

increase in extra services sold

%8

increase in time spent on city pages & FAQ

+

improved NSP & SUS scores

Our team consisted of 1 UX Strategist, 1 Researcher, 1 UI Designer, and me working as the UX Architect/Designer— responsible for designing the interactions, and building the information architecture; including user flows, content architecture, navigation and category map

• You need to be flexible in providing design solutions when an unforeseen circumstance —such as Covid— happens throughout of the project
• Designing the structure of search, notifications, and announcements is no easy task. All require careful planning, thinking and execution
• Benchmarks might become your friends when you have no budget or time for specific research methods. However, you should remember that although they may have big teams or budgets with 6-figures, they can make so simple —yet important— mistakes that deal serious blows on the experience
• I’d love to work on all the notifications and mailing content if we had the time and budget
• More takeaways coming soon!