SoFarAway
Vacation Simplified
2020
The Problem
How can the team create a budget-friendly service for clients, especially those with families, who cannot pay large sums of money upfront when traveling?
The Solution
The team believes this vacation problem has a solution via an online service that allows clients to pay for their vacations in monthly installments. In addition, the team wants to relieve anxiety related to the travel purchase process and enable long-term certainty in travel planning. The team designed SoFarAway, a website service, to be intuitive and offer a one-stop-shop for vacation seekers. relieve anxiety related to the travel purchase process and enable long-term certainty in travel planning.
Constraints
Must be able to...
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Create an account and login/logout of the portal
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Search and reserve the desired flight
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Search and reserve the desired hotel
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Make an informed decision about payment
breakdown when selecting from weekly, biweekly,
and monthly payment options
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Manage (view, cancel, change) existing reservation(s)
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Contact customer service for assistance through
chat, email, and phone
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Ensure functionality is optimized for desktop
experience
Team
This was a graduate project with three members.
Design: My role
Research: Myself and two others
I equally shared the research work by helping gather participants, moderate interviews, take notes during interviews, gather and analyze data. I also created all the design work for the final prototype.
Should...
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Be able to search and reserve local experience(s)
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Provide simple-to-understand and transparent pricing
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Provide travel alternatives that fit customer budget
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Provide featured destinations and pricing to simplify vacation planning
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Ensure the portal is optimized for mobile viewing
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Allow vacation planner capability to save future vacation ideas
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Integrate with other customer review portal(s)
Research
Practical Persona Method
We began our research with the practical persona method. The personas focused on young professionals,
mid-career small and large families. The target users the personas are based on were between 25-45 with an equivalent split in male/female and on average these families have 2 children. Both spouses very likely work. This demographic has a household income ranging from 30k to 150k. These particular users live across the United States and professionally are representative of the overall professional makeup of the United States. These users would anticipate carrying a high per capita debt load (primarily student and home loans, with an average to below-average credit card debt). Our average family will have 2-3 weeks of available vacation time per year. The average small family will spend $4,580 on vacation. (https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-vacation).
Example of one of the persona profiles
Surveys and Questionnaires
The team wrote up surveys and questionnaires that five participants filled out during an interview. The goal in this specific research phase was to determine the level of interest for SoFarAway.
Usability Test
We conducted interviews and usability tests with the five participants. The participants were given two scenarios to complete; a traditional approach using booking a vacation how they normally would, and the other was booking a vacation with a potential competitor for SoFarAway, airfordable.com. We gathered the data from the second scenario to determine what worked for the website and what created problems for the users while completing the task. Only one participant was able to successfully complete the task in airfordable.com.
Empathy Map
While conducting the usability tests the team made notes on what the participants liked or did not like while using airfordable.com. We also wrote down quotes from the participants during the usability test. These notes and tests were then compiled and organized into an empathy map in Miro.
Story Mapping and Feedback
With the data, we gathered from the previous research we created initial wireframe sketches into story maps. These were put into a shareout board in Miro and sent to our peers for them to evaluate and write feedback.
Payment breakdown shareout board
Prototypes
Low-Fidelity
This prototype was mocked up in Balsamiq with all of the feedback and research in mind. The team also made adjustments so that customers could easily reschedule or defer their trip since halfway through this project COVID was prominent worldwide.
Sample screenshots of the low-fidelity prototype
After creating the full low-fidelity prototype the team conducted another round of usability tests with the same five participants in the previous tests. These usability tests incorporated a questionnaire and a survey after they completed the tasks. A few of the points learned from this usability test were:
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Search is preferred as the primary interaction during a search. Even when users were nudged toward chat.
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Users when given monthly payment amounts often did not worry about the total cost of the trip (perception of costs).
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Chat should be visible, available, and non-invasive.
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Payment workflow interactions were well received.
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Trust-based issues become more prevalent if chat and platform are distinct, chat likely will only work well if it’s trusted, moving chat to a social platform significantly impacts trust among users.
Final UI Design
The final prototype was built out in XD by me. I cleaned up the Balsamiq prototype and added the feedback from the last useability test with the five participants.
Homepage
Sign In pop-up
Customize payments page
Manage a trip from a customer's account