Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine pain points within the process of planning a vacation and see how it could be reevaluated and designed in a way that would make the planning process more successful and convenient for users. In order to determine these pain points, a series of different methods of user research were conducted to include: in person interviews, audio recordings, analyzing data and sorting data through affinity clustering. The data was later broken down into persona profiles, user flows, and high levelm prototyping. During this case study, certain terms will be identified and defined in a way that will make the process easier to follow. These definitions were derived from in-class graduate school discussions with my fellow peers and online research.

Preface: Every day, millions of people around the world spend time online planning trips to destinations of their choosing. Many different sites and planning resources are used. I decided to look further into the steps of how different users go through this process. I began by thinking about how I plan a vacation and how different the experience would be for the person next to me. Everyone has different places that they want to go or things that they want to see. For this case study, I dove into the process of a task flow for user research broken down into interviews and data analyzation. I gave users the task of “planning a vacation.” They had complete freedom in the task, they could plan the trip to be anywhere that they would like, they could plan it for themselves or for a group, and they could plan travel arrangements in any way that they choose.

My ROle

I was the co-researcher for this project. My partner and I each interviewed 5 people and recorded the audio and computer screens of the interviewees. We then each analyzed our data to come together to sort through the data as a whole and began to draw conclusions, see patterns and define trends within our research. From there, we each decided on a problem and a solution to the problem through user flows and prototyping. Throughout my research, I noticed that the process of planning a vacation was much more stressful than it needed to be. I was realizing that there seemed to be some truth to the famous saying, “I am going to need a vacation from this vacation” and I needed to create a process for users to take the stress away. My process of research, analyzing, design and prototyping will be broken down for you in the following case study.

User Interviews

The interview process began with my partner and I defining a list of on-boarding questions. For the sake of this case study, onboarding can be defined as, helping the user to understand the value of a product and introduce the experience patterns of the system. These questions would allow us to have a little background on each of our users before the flow of planning a vacation began. We explained to the users that there are no wrong answers, that if they felt uncomfortable with anything they would not be forced to proceed, and that we were not able to lead them through the process-so they should go through the motions as they would whether we were watching or not. The questions that we asked our users included the following:

1. How old are you?

2. Where are you from?

3.  What is your occupation?

4.  How tech savvy are you?

5. Do you prefer to use websites or apps?

6.  Do you use mobile or desktop more often?

7.  What search engine do you use?

8.  Have you ever planned a vacation before?

9.  What do you think the most important thing about planning a vacation is?

After defining the onboarding questions that we would use, we started to craft our plan for user interviews. For the purpose of this case study, a user interview can be defined as a conversation focused on understanding a user’s mental model of a system.

During the user interviews, we asked users the onboarding questions and then tasked them with planing a vacation of their choice. They could go anywhere and plan anything they wanted. We explained that we would be recording the screen and asking them questions along the way in order to better understand their process.

Interview Results

All of our users started by opening Google Chrome. When asked why, they said that it was their default browser that they trusted. From there, sites such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Priceline and Google Maps were searched. During the process, we asked users why they were using the sites that they were or searching the terms that they were searching. Many of our users said that they wanted to get reviews or read more about an area that they had an interest in before planning a trip. Some users said they were using certain sites because they trusted them or they had reward programs through the site. Other users said they were not even sure where to go, so they needed suggestions.

During the interview process it became clear that different users prioritized different things when it came to planning a vacation. Some said they wouldn’t book a flight until they knew there would be things to do there during the time when they wanted to go and they could get a good hotel rate. Others said they would book the hotel first because if they didn’t have a place to stay, they wouldn’t know where to plan activities to do. Others didn’t want a long and confusing process to plan a vacation, so they decided to plan a cruise where everything could be planned at one time.

It was around this time during the interview process that I started to hit pain points with my users. Some users relied on other people they would be planning the trip with from a financial perspective. Others said, they wanted to plan activities with friends or family but it was hard to get everyone to sit down at one time or place to do it at the same time and book the same flights and hotels. This could result in losing out on deals or dates because of having to wait to coordinate schedules with everyone going to plan their trip.

After laying out all 10 of our post its interpretation of interviews, we began to see patterns in our research. Common websites that users trusted, things that were important to users such as money or time, and overarching planning tasks such as booking hotels, flights, things to do or booking a cruise. We also got to see the way that users thought about what they were planning and why they were planning it. Some users didn’t mind waiting until they got to their destination to plan things to do and some wanted to book what they wanted to do before they got there. Most users said that where they would be going would be based off of everyone’s availability who was going. Price was very important, if not always the most important thing to our users.

The budget for the vacation and the price for each aspect of the trip played a huge role in what they would be planning. Convenience was another thing, if the process was taking too long the user would get annoyed. Many users tried to use only one or two sites to plan the entire trip because it saved time from having to visit multiple sites. Again, in this step of the process I saw patterns in many of the user quotes about relying on everyone else who was going to be able to plan/ book the same things or not wanting to book everyone’s payment on one person’s credit card.

Affinity Diagram

After collecting all of our interviews via post it notes, we took all of them and created an affinity diagram. For the purpose of this case study, an affinity diagram can be defined as a tool that gathers large amounts of data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on similar themes and ideas. After grouping our post its into overarching categories, we were able to see the things that users did the most and common thoughts that the users were having. We broke the diagram down in to the following categories:

1. Demographics

2. Knowledge of Technology

3. First Time Planning or Not 4. Most Important Part of Planning

5. The Destination and Why

6. What Would They Plan First

7. Alone Or With Others

8. Payment

9. Hotel Details

Problems to solve for

After we had broken down and analyzed the affinity diagram, my partner and I each decided on a problem to solve and a solution to the problem. This would change the way that vacation planning was done and the way that users felt about the process. Through the affinity diagram, I determined that streamlining the planning process to allow for collaboration with everyone who would be going on the trip would be an ideal solution to the problem at hand. Our largest clusters in the diagram fell into the categories where users were choosing the booking details of hotels, flights, things to do, etc. All things that cost a lot of money and could potentially not work if everyone was not able to book the same details.

Persona Development

We created personas based on the user interviews and the information that we gathered from the affinity clustering exercise. This helped us to align pain points with different users and highlight what was most important when laying out the current state user journey.

Creating the user flow (CURRENT STATE)

The next part of our research was laying out the current task flow for planning a vacation. This allowed us to visualize our research into a flow/journey that showed the process, different actions taken, problems and pain points, as well as direct quotes from users and insights we had. The flow below shows the different decisions or steps users took when planning a vacation, the steps that were the most important for users to take, and websites they used during the planning process.

By laying out the current state user journey, we were able to conclude that users were looking for quick and easy planning, a streamlined website where all tasks could be completed in one place, and ease of collaboration between all parties involved.

Wireframes

While our research didn’t include design, we thought it would be helpful to layout two different homepage wireframes as a starting point for an all-inclusive vacation planning site. One is a more lower fidelity and one is a bit more detailed. These wires would be used to drive the next phase of the research which would include clickable prototypes and user testing.