BIZTRIP — A Travel booking app
In a scenario where there are countless solutions in the market about travel-related apps, how shall one differentiate their own “original” idea?
The class was asked to launch a new product for booking travel, with the condition that the main source of revenue had to come from the booking of flights, and that we will have to offer the market with a competitive advantage not only based on price. Overall, this project meant designing an MVP — Minimum Viable Product — in just one week.
For the purpose of this assignment, we had to design both on iOS and Android and had 3 proto-personas to select.
Team Size: Individual
Duration: 1 week
Deliverables: Research summary, Visual branding identity,Click-through prototype, Presentation
Materials: Wireframe notebook, pen, pencil, articles on Internet
Apps used: Figma, Miro
Steps followed
I’ll quickly summarize the whole process so that you all understand the steps I took at each moment to get to my final result.
The process followed throughout the whole week could be summarized in 4 main areas:
- First, some research & benchmarking of existing solutions.
- Then the definition of the problem and the user persona we would be working on.
- Third, the definition of the business and the brand itself.
- And lastly, the ideation & iteration phase.
Nonetheless, I’ll give you a more in-detail planning, so that you can follow the whole reasoning I did.
01. Competitive Benchmarking
First and foremost, I wanted to investigate what were the already existing solutions.
Our competitors’ research was based in some companies that were offering same travel booking features, such as Skyscanner, Plan B or Hopper; and companies such as Volaris, Skyhi or Surfair, that are addressed towards a more corporate traveler.
02. User Research
For the User Research part, the findings were based on Instagram polls, some articles and statistics found on the Internet about the industry, and 3 interviews carried out.
The research showed us that:
- 90% of trips are made within the Spanish territory
- All of our interviewees told us that their employer pay for their travel expenses
- And that the main motives for corporate travelling are attending to congresses or trainings, or meetings with clients
Moreover, some articles were also talking that the current economic situation is leading to a change in the business model for many airlines, where subscription comes in.
“I think airlines have understood that they have to change the model to have a mix of transactional revenue and subscription revenue.” — said Uriz, CEO de Caravelo.
03. Problem Definition
All in all, the problem we would be working on is the following:
Business travelers need a way to keep travelling because it helps them build relationships with their stakeholders.
For that reason, our solution will be oriented towards corporate business travelers, who want to keep travelling on a regular basis, to meet their different stakeholders. While doing so, we are both helping airlines to keep generating some revenue, and helping our corporate clients build more robust relationships with their partners.
Who will we be our user?
Alicia, our persona, works for a multinational company like Mango and is a business traveler. She values the possibility of travelling to improve her relationships with stakeholders, and 2020 has prevented that from happening more often. When she goes on a corporate trip, her company always pays her costs fully, but still, she always tries to keep it cheap.
Her team is expecting that the upcoming months will enable them to travel more often, and that the whole pandemic situation becomes more flexible.
04. The Business Model
Some assumptions made for the sake of this project are that:
- The project would be further researched and tested
- The economics of the project have to be reviewed
- The project would be financially backed up by a venture builder or venture capital
Regarding the revenue model, the main source of revenue is through subscription plans, and secondly, some commissions generated by 3rd parties referral programs.
Some KPIs we would be focusing on once we launched the MVP into the market would include not only in-app indicators (such as number of tickets sold and 3rd parties revenues), but also some external ones, like the acceptance rate, through average reviews and number of downloads.
So… what is Biztrip so far?
Biztrip is a subscription plan for corporate travelers that allows you to have 50% discount on flights to selected destinations.
05. Ideation stage
If you have any entrepreneurial cell in your body, you may know by now that, when you have an idea, you diverge and explore thousands of things you could do with that idea: trillions of features, gazillions of partners, …
But at the end, any idea has to start by simple and relevant features. That’s why we helped ourselves with the feature prioritization matrix, where in the vertical axis we assign a value for the users, and in the horizontal axis we assign a level of complexity of developing such features. And then you split those features into 3 categories, by creating 3 parallel diagonal axis: the upper ones will be the ones we need to develop, the second ones will be the ones we might think of adding like “extra features” and the others could be put on hold for further versions of the project.
Apart from that, we tried to narrow down all of our ideas by sketching first a simple user flow, with all the different possibilities and paths the user could take in the MVP version of the app.
Once we had our ideas more structured, we started sketching with some crazy 8s and exploring different design variations. Here you can see some of those first thoughts.
06. Early Prototyping
We decided to start designing on an iOS framework, since another research showed us that:
- iOS users tend to spend more time with their phones, and since our persona is a businesswoman, we expect her to use her phone often
- iOS users are perceived to be early adopters and develop more leadership roles. We consider our user to be tech-savy, and therefore, fits in this rationale.
- In-app shopping 4 times higher in iOS. We are conceiving booking flights within the app, so we need our users to be used to this, and iOS users normally are.
For the first paper, prototype, we explored different options for the “My trips” screen, as well as for the home screen.
At the end, we managed to summarize all of our ideas in a simple paper prototype like this:
07. The Branding
First of all, why BIZTRIP? We wanted to have a catchy and easy to pronounce name, that was quite obvious for the user. That’s why we tried several combinations until we found this one:
BIZTRIP = BUSINESS (“BIZ”) + TRIP
The color palette was a tough decision, since we explored over 13 color combinations, and we ended up going to a more serious and elegant option, choosing a very dark tone of blue and a pale pink.
In the desirability testing, the brand was perceived by our testers to be overall organized, intuitive and easy to use, although we have to still improve our value proposition to make it more unique.
08. Later Prototyping
After having done the first prototype and having chosen a brand identity, we started ideating the mid-fi and hi-fi prototypes.
User case scenario:
Alicia: “my boss just told me that I have to attend to an important meeting with a client in Las Palmas at the beginning of December. So, I’ll open my Biztrip app and book the flights.”
Our testers did this same path when testing our platform, and we also told them to navigate through the whole thing, so that they could tell us some other improvements.
ITERATIONS ON PROFILE SCREEN
And that’s why we iterated several times our design screens. For instance, in the profile screen, we started very basic, with just a summary of the plan, and then our testers started giving us some feedback of what they were missing.
ITERATIONS ON MY PLAN SCREEN
A similar situation happened in the “My plan” screen. Several testers told us that they were confused between this screen and the following one, so we altered the order of both screens, so that it didn’t seem redundant.
09. Final Touches
iOS vs Android interface
Then, we also designed some screens for the alternative Android system, where both the top and bottom menu are different, and the Android frames on Figma forced us to condense our text, reduce proportions and sizes.
Heuristics evaluation
Some heuristics we’ve observed in the project include: system status, error prevention, consistency standards or recognition rather than recall.
The CRAP can be clearly represented in this screen, where we can find all four elements of CRAP: contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.
Conclusions
Overall, I feel like there is still a lot to do in the project, and that further features could be developed and tested, like a more advanced calendar feature, or exploring more about the interactions with the corporate customer, as well as creating secondary user flows.
Some learnings from this week are that going too much into detail is not always worth it, that creativity is often gotten through thousands and thousands of iterations. And, on a personal level, I tried to challenge myself to do a vast part of the project during the first days, but I was overoptimistic, and probably pushed myself too hard, when I should have tried to disconnect, get some batteries and be back on track.
Please, feel free to contact me if you have any inquiries or are interested on continuing this project.
