KAYAK x PUXD
For this project, the PUXD program worked with KAYAK, a metasearch travel company, to develop a group travel planning feature on their website. KAYAK also wanted design recommendations for the current features that already existed on their site. Here is the full documentation of our project.
Personal Contributions
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Development of Hi-Fi Prototypes
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Protocol Writing
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User Testing
Final Deliverables
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Design Recommendations
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High Fidelity Prototypes
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Documentation
Initial Research
Goals:
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To understand user patterns
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To know what features are important to users when planning a group trip
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We also used this research to narrow our focus to a more specific user group
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Insights:
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Friend Group Travel was the main user group from our findings
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Budget, Location, and Dates were the main factors in traveling
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People wanted any easy way to plan and communicate their travel plans in a more cohesive way
Journey Map
Goals:
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To outline the users' experience
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To visually understand the overall process
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Insights:
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Users have different preferences for how they plan their trip
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There is a need for constant communication
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People within the group might have different priorities of budget, location, and dates
There are five stages: Discovery, Planning, Booking, Traveling, & Exit. Our team laid out the whole journey for a trip, but through our initial research, we found that our area of focus was in the Planning Stage. The Planning Stages start off with searching for trips and move into a cycle of finalizing a budget, location, and dates. After all three have been decided on, there are the final stages of voting and deciding on a trip or finalizing all of the details.
Competitive Analysis
Goals:
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To understand the pain points of KAYAK's direct competitors
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Understand certain features on competitors' website for design opportunities for KAYAK
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Insights:
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Found that features were centered around budgeting, location choosing, and planning
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What features should be incorporated to make KAYAK more collaboration friendly
Feature Sketching
Goals:
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To take everything we have learned thus far and create/update features for the new design/concept for KAYAK
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Insights:
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Tangible visualizations for certain features surrounding Budget, Date, and Location
Final Design
Our final design for KAYAK was a feature within the overall website which can be used collaboratively or alone depending on the type of trip the user is planning. Based on the research above and the journey we were designing within our system acts like its own website within KAYAK. Our team believed this system to be the most effective because of how the process of planning a trip was mapped out. Below is our final design
Please hit the full screen button for a better experience
To better understand what each page is showing, our team made a presentation to describe all of the features/what the user would be doing in this process. We hope this is informative but if you have any questions about this project or design please reach out to me!