Kawaii
UI/UX & Usability Testing Project
Project Overview
Kawaii is an innovative travel app that simplifies group trip planning. Through a user-centered approach, it addresses common pain points in organizing group travel. The app facilitates collaborative decision-making with a voting feature, ensuring all travelers' needs are considered, and provides personalized recommendations based on group preferences. It goes beyond ticket booking to enhance the overall travel experience.
Formative User Research
I conducted a formative research study through surveys and interview on young travelers regarding their travel preferences, behaviors, and experience in order to guide us in creating a collaborative travel planning application.
For the research study, the main research questions aimed to answer were:
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What things do travelers value when they are making decisions for travel?
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What are the most frustrating problems to travelers when they are planning to travel?
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How do travelers collaborate with other travelers while making travel plans?
In the survey，I conducted with 25 respondents, most users like to use Expedia for both flight ticket purchase and hotel booking. Most users would need to rent cars during the trips. Safety is the most significant need for users’ trips. Price, comfort, and environment are other most related factors that users take into consideration of travel planning. Most users use group text messages for travel planning, they mostly spend more than a day for trip planning.
In addtion, I also conducted an interview with 4 respondents who are within the 21-30 age range and who had experienced travel planning in the past year. My interviews revealed several pain points and frustrations:
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Difficulty in integrating all travelers’ time schedules.
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Difficulty in balance all travelers’ needs for a trip.
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Hard time scheduling the actual timeline of the whole trip. There are many time uncertainties during the whole trip such as traffic jam problems.
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Spends so much time checking prices on different platforms. Customers need a more price-transparent platform or a "collection" to show pricing across different platforms. For example, Google travel listed different prices across different websites to the same type , same size of room / flight / rental car.
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Spends so much time on researching and comparing tourist attractions research and comparison. Travelers need to do many google research of attractions and also check travelers’ reviews in different platforms.
Project Goal Setup
Kawaii - A mobile application designed for groups to easily make travel plans together
Main Research Questions For This Project
1.How do users navigate the application to create travel plans?
2.What are some issues encountered and areas of improvement for the application?
3.How can I improve the success and satisfaction rate of the performance of the different tasks in my usability testing plan?
Statement Question
How can I make travel planning more collaborative for young travelers?
Storyboard
Persona
From the formative research, I came up with a persona named Jessica, a young small business owner who also loves to travel with friend and family. By identified her core needs and frustrations based on the insights that I got from group interviews.
User Journey Map
I also created a user journey map that details the different journey phases, actions, mindsets and emotions, and opportunities and insights that I can explore in the application. The user journey map helped us identify what the flow of our site will be like. It also allowed us to think of delighter functions that I can incorporate in prototype to make the user journey smoother and to lessen frustrations.
User Flow
The user flow I created was based on the flow of Expedia, Costal Travel, and Google Calendar with some minor tweaks. I adjusted the flow to integrate the features and steps that I found were missing or could be improved from my user research. The goal was to make everything sensible and seamless.
Usability Test
By conduct a total of four usability tests with participants who matched the demographics of target audience - young travelers aged 21-35. Each team member conducted a single session remotely or virtually, during which recorded the session and took notes on key findings. Following the usability tests, I also analyzed the data collected and identified patterns to summarize research insights. This rigorous approach allowed me to gain a deep understanding of my users' needs and expectations, informing my design process and enabling us to create a solution that provided a seamless travel planning experience.
Mockups & Style Guide
Payment Mockup
Invitation Function
Booking Process
Trip Planning
Prototype based on differen user sernario
Creating prototypes based on different functions was a strategic approach to thoroughly explore and refine the various aspects of the Kawaii travel app. This approach had several advantages: it allowed for focused testing on specific features, identified potential pain points early on, and ensured that each function met user expectations. The biggest takeaways from this process were the ability to address specific user needs and gather targeted feedback. To bring the testing results back into usability testing and implement the next design version, I integrated user feedback and insights from each function's prototype to refine the overall app design. This iterative approach refined my design thinking and strategy, emphasizing the importance of user-centered design and continuous improvement in delivering a seamless and satisfying travel planning experience.