Helping one of Sweden’s largest companies define new business venture within travel
UX, SERVICE DESIGN, PRODUCT DESIGN
During our UX module at Hyper Island, our brief was to help one of Sweden’s largest companies validate or reject the idea of growing their business into the travel sector. The company is not currently within travel and looking to find new potential revenue streams. Over 5 weeks time our tasks included:
Identify which assumptions about travel are critical to validate
Find best method for testing assumptions
If validated, imagine what this new venture could, and should be
Provide roadmap of how a new travel venture should be executed
Delivery: User research insights from interviews & surveys, user personas, travel app concept, site map helping define offering, low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes, & recommended launch plan.
My role: Creative lead. Focused emphasis on overall concept & user research. The team consisted of seven students.
Please note: our proposed concept is currently being executed by the client & mostly confidential. I am unable to show final concept, prototypes or our specific insights leading to the approved concept. However, upon an interview stage I can show all of our work, both concept & prototypes.
In an already saturated travel market,
how do we become a unique travel offering?
We began with establishing context, plotting our assumptions about travel & researching the competitive landscape
Assumption mapping: What do we know, what do we assume, what don’t we know about travel. Using this tool to help guide our research.
IDEO’s Frame Your Design Challenge to better understand our challenge, our constraints & our desired impact.
Conducting market research to understand competitor strengths and weaknesses & identify potential gaps in the market.
Looking into future scenarios, what will travel look like in 2030?
Future scenarios allowed us to think beyond current problems within travel, & instead tap into future obstacles and possibilities. What are social, economical, technological & political scenarios of the future? How would this impact the travel industry?
Creating hypothetical future scenarios & looking into future trends enabled us to brainstorm around a more sustainable solution for the client, instead of simply an immediate fix for todays travel market. These methods allowed us to look past current problems & help us imagine future problems & potential solutions.
Identifying a user’s potential pain & gain points in booking travel
By putting ourselves into the mindset of a user booking a trip, we were able to identify two potential areas of exploration based on their pain points. How might we further inspire travelers? And how might we ease their booking process?
Getting to know the user, understanding user needs within travel
To be able to identify any gaps within the travel market, user research was crucial to better understand what travelers are actually missing. Posing unbiased questions to users in surveys & interviews, carefully probing discussions further without adding our own interpretations or hypothesis into the conversation to get the users true perspective.
“If you try & think back on the last time your planned to go on a vacation, what made you interested in that location? Walk me through how you chose this destination?”
— Sample interview question
Analyzing & identifying reoccurring themes in user responses
Using Trello as collaborative tool amongst the team to anaylze our interview responses, we categorized each user by color and name. Then, adding in quotes from each interviewee. This allowed us to collect & identify reoccurring themes amongst all responses. These themes became the building blocks for our brainstorming sessions & heavily influenced our final travel concept.
Extracting & visualizing these reoccurring themes to share with client
Plotting our insights on an Empathy Map & User vs. Business Needs matrix helped us guide the client in our decision making process & why we reached our proposed travel concept.
Using key insights from interviews & research as inspiration for low fidelity prototypes
Gathering all insights from our user research, market research & future forecasting, we moved into low-fidelity prototypes to quickly iterate our ideas as well as conduct simple & time effective user tests. Learnings from these sessions heavily influenced our high-fidelity digital prototypes.
Client feedback
““The students exceeded our expectations on both points of focus from the brief. They provided us with a prototype that felt both relevant yet different from anything available on the market today. The reasoning and research behind the proposed concept were well done and thorough. The group also provided us with suggestions on some concrete next steps including potential merge & acquisition targets. The positive attitude and high energy of the group had a positive impact on many in our organisation and highlighted the advantages of the user first process.”
”
To see final concept, prototypes & our launch plan…
Let’s set up an interview, would love to share the entire project & where our new travel venture landed.