What is the project

Planning for business traveling usually starts with flight booking. TripActions provides multi-city option besides one way and round trip. However, the previous version of multi-city search experience was designed two years ago with outdated UI/UX across platforms. It has been leading increasingly high customer support costs and more complaints in NPS verbatims. This project aims to refresh the entire experience. 

What are the goals we need to achieve

Unlike most other flight booking platforms only support one type of search options. TripActions platform offers two types of search options for booking multi-city flights: (1) Bundled flights ticket (2) Customized flights. The former type offers limited options in combination but usually better prices. The later one enables more flexibility on schedules but usually higher prices. Together, they can satisfy various needs for business users.

Pervious two independent search flows

Previously, users start the flow on the search inputs page to provide trip information and choose the search type. Then they can browse the options on the search results page. If they want to switch to another search type, they have to go back to the search inputs page to redo the search. It’s time-consuming for users to find the best options since they have to go back and forth to compare schedules and prices.

Discover - understand the industry and user needs

To uncover user problems and opportunities, I started with conducting various types research: (1) Gathered user data and NPS verbatims to understand their current behaviors and synthesize pain points; (2) Conducted Competitor Analysis to understand common patterns (3) Audited the experience and conducted user interviews to understand the frictions in current flow

Problems need to be solved

Based on findings from the research phase, I summarized a number of identified pain points, among which four were prioritized as quick wins after considering the cost (timeline / engineering resources) and user values (usage frequency / user coverage).

Concept ideation to explore a potential direction

Initially, I explored various ideas for prioritized problems respectively. Considering their dependency and connections in the holistic user flow, I created two integrated concepts for the second round of ideation. To iterate the concepts, I tested them with seven users for feedback. Recruited users for these moderated sessions include EAs (who book flights for the executives), Road Warriors (who travel frequently ) and ICs (who travel less frequently).

Trade-off constraints

I shared user testing insights with the team at the weekly design sync meeting. Business ops and engineer lead shared the feedback based on their stands of points as well as some conflict constraints.

Final design: Best of both worlds