Expedia Mobile App: Discovered Millennials Trip Planning Behavior

January to April, 2017

-Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation-

Expedia's services were being primarily used in shopping and buying phases. The company hoped to expand their services to the trip planning stages in the near future. To help Expedia develop the related features, my teammates and I were studying millennials' travel planning behaviors. We investigated their planning process and provided insights to improve the user interface of the Expedia mobile app.

My Role

What we used: sitemap, interview, comparative analysis, survey, heuristic evaluation, usability testing

I worked on this project with the other 4 students in a course called "Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation." I experienced different research methodologies and wrote key findings and recommendations for each report.

Interview

I conducted three interviews with millennial travelers. Overall we had seven in total, and six of them were valid. From the interviews, we discovered:

  • The tools users frequently used for planning trips
  • The problems the travelers encountered while using online tools to plan their trip.
And we built the personas accordingly.

One of the personas, "Cindy"

Comparative Analysis

We analyzed 8 competitors by comparing the features and UI patterns of each app interface.

Example: Q9- How many reviews do you read before booking an activity?

Survey

We wrote about 40 survey questions and extracted 15 questions by discussing with Expedia to assure we could get the data they wanted, which was to understand the roles that UGC played in pre-booking and in-trip activity planning.

Heuristic Evaluation

Each of the team members conducted the evaluation with Nielsen’s 10 key usability heuristics, but we modified some of the checklists to make applicable evaluations for Expedia web page.

Checklist of the first key: Visibility of System Status

Usability Testing

We conducted usability tests with 5 millennial travelers on TripAdvisor mobile app to understand millennials trip planning behavior when using a mobile travel application.

Reflection

By doing this project, I learned how different UX research methods were applied to the study in the different research stages.

Also, I understood how research methods could be applied flexibly. For instance, usability testing could be conducted not only on our own product but also on a competitor product so we could learn from it.

Some limitations that I noticed were the homogenous recruitment pool, which was mainly from the University of Michigan, School of Information. And I should keep in mind that the result might be biased.

Final clip

My Works


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February, 2018

Secure Mail was being redesigned and would launch the new user interface based on the findings and recommendations from the Competitive Analysis that I did during my summer internship. I conducted 6 user testing to help validate the new design concepts. Read More>>

Secure Mail: Benchmarking Research (NDA)

May - August, 2017

I worked as a Product Design Research Intern at Citrix Product Design team. I led the UX research study on Secure Mail app to guide the redesign efforts with design recommendations. I did a competitive analysis with gap analysis and 20 user experience testing to identify the use cases and understand the product positioning in the market. Read More>>

To comply with my Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), I have omitted or reinterpreted the confidential information, but it wouldn't affect me to share my thoughts, personal experience, and what I had learned with you.



Expedia Mobile App: Discovering Millennials Trip Planning Behavior

January - April, 2017

My teammates and I conducted interviews, comparative analysis, surveys, heuristic evaluation, online surveys, and usability testing to investigate how millennial travelers planned their trips with online tools. Based on our findings, Expedia would expand their service and create a new feature that would assist people to explore new destinations for travel. Read More>>










2nd Brain: Needs Finding and Validation

January - April, 2017

My team members and I conducted surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews to study what problems teenagers with chronic illnesses were facing and what they needed to improve their medication adherence. The project was particularly interesting due to the traits of our audiences and the dynamic relationship between stakeholders and audiences. Therefore, the process of needs validation was unique and challenging. Read More>>







Michigan Legal Help: Identified Workflow Issues

September - December, 2016

Using contextual inquiries, my teammates and I investigated how people work at Michigan Legal Help, a non-profit organization, in order to help them upgrade their workflow. Read More>>