Desk Research:

9 in every 10 people travel every day. Of these, 60% of the trips are booked online. The reason for this is that there are a lot of travel management and booking platforms available. Most of these platforms have very poor user experience which could range from too many colours to low-quality images or too much text or a disorganization of the many options struggling to be picked by the user.

When users are met with scenarios that these, they remain stuck in a fight or flight mode and start to wonder which option is more value for their money. Because of this, users open multiple tabs with multiple options, and 40% of the time, they don't go ahead with any option. They instead just get the prices, go to a physical office and make payment there, resulting in less profit for the online platform.

This problem is what inspired me to explore this topic; inspiring me to help others reduce the cognitive load when booking trips online and help the business make more money.

User Persona:

After spending time to read the reviews left by users of these platforms. I discovered something - 74.5% of the users were not happy and confused. These users belonged to a younger generation as opposed to the 25.5% who were older (55 - above) and didn't really care about the system.
One thing that stood out was that for some, instead of enjoying all of the features, they would just use the platforms for price and option comparisons.

I then decided to have one-on-one interviews with more users. After talking and listening to their pain points, I analysed their feedback with care not to miss anything. 37% of the users interviewed were men, and the other 63% were women.

From here, I created a user persona that fitted all of the needs, and main problems of the user group.

User Flows:

After learning how to speak the language of the users, I had to learn to infuse this with the goals of the business.
By doing so, I was able to come up with the seamless interaction for the user flow with all the required features (from both the user-end and the business-end), and a journey that was not overwhelming or underwhelming.

Sketches:

The client had requested for a static website, and this made balancing the business needs with the user needs easily.

This meant that there would not be a lot of ads or pop ups compelling the user to check out a new offer. Users would just come on the platform, see the travel cities, and then request a call back. Hence the design would have to be as straightforward as possible.

Final Design:

Tests And Feedback:

Two words "simplicity" and "details". These were what the user needed and that is what this design provided. The trip booking process was broken down into three major actions: pick a city, select extra services and preferred activities, send.

With the "plan a trip" option, the design solves the user's problem of non-transparent travel costs. Users would get a call back together with an email containing the details of their quotation, and while on the call, they would discuss with the service agent the best options to go with based on their pocket needs.

Most users were excited about the "extra services and preferred activities" feature. They said that this was a great addition, since they could pay for everything in advance. The only thing left to do would be to travel.

Improvements/insights:

While feedback gotten from the Usability testing was mostly great, there were however some concerns from the users.

One of these concerns was how quickly inflationary price changes would be reflected.
Some other users were concerned about whether or not there would be an online payment feature and a means of processing large payment sums in the future. However, this need appealed more to the younger generation of the user group (below 30) than the older generation who were more comfortable with making payments offline.

Conclusion:

Based on the user feedback gotten from the usability tests, I can conclude that the desired goals of the users and the business were met.

Although, there were a few challenges that the users encountered, the next steps would be to gather more research data through more interviews, surveys and analysis of the competition. This will help me understand what the best ways are, if need be, to go about adding the features to the platform.