Fly UX
Fly UX is a fictional app designed for booking flights. This project was the focus of my UX Design Diploma that was sat in 2019.
Project Outline
The brief for the app was simple; A user friendly journey that allowed consumers to book flights from a mobile device.
Initial Steps
For the project, I followed the real life cycle of a UX project, whilst also expanding my UX knowledge by covering topics such as UX principles, user research, analysis frameworks, interaction design, prototyping and wireframing.
Below is a detailed explanation of the processes undertaken from start to finish, this will hopefully give you a detailed description of how I work as a UX Designer and the research process that is required in order to create an appropriate and defined outcome.
Research
In order to find out how users expect a flight booking app to work I undertook User Research by means of Usability testing (use current flight booking apps already found in the app store) and Depth Interviews. Both of these were scripted prior to the interviews and recorded (with permission) for my records and research.
The User Goals were ascertained via a digital survey, using Survey Monkey. The results of which were then analysed for the project. See the results here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/stories/SM-XWMTRBS7/
Competitive Benchmarking was required in order to understand the current apps available to consumers in more detail. 4 different apps were benchmarked for this part of the process: British Airways, Emirates, easyJet and Skyscanner (Aggregator). To see the benchmarking in full go to: https://bit.ly/2DzCvvd
A huge part of the project was looking at how the user interacts with booking apps, what is a priority, where do they need to input data, what is just a distraction on current apps. This was looked into by means of an affinity app using all the information I had already acquired from my prior research. My affinity diagram can be seen at: https://bit.ly/329Zw2c
The customer journey when using any app should be the priority in the design, fancy features can be added but if these are not presented in a logical and useful way they just become a distraction and unhelpful. To add with this I created a customer journey map for a generic booking app. This map shows the process in order, what the goals are for each stage and what the user should be looking to do at each stage. Most importantly it shows the feelings of a user at each stage and what their pain points may be. This is important because you can then look to work around this pain points and build a better journey for the end user. An example of this can be seen here: https://bit.ly/2OiFRoA
Design Process
Next comes the Flow Diagram, this is pretty straightforward in explanation but quite complicated in execution as at this stage I would look to cover all aspects of interaction and where those interactions and gestures would lead in the app that I am creating. The Fly UX app had the potential to have many different directions that would create distractions in the journey, therefore it was important to highlight this at this stage and attempt to avoid them where possible. By follow diagram for Fly UX can be seen here: https://bit.ly/3ekG3y7
Next, I begun to define the navigation of the app. This is where the true design aspect comes in. This is the point that sketched out the variety of navigation menus that would feature in the app and annotated the rationale behind these navigation choices. My sketch and annotations for the Fly UX app can be found here: https://bit.ly/2CnHdvA
On top of the navigation design is the interaction design and this is where I sketched out the entire journey of the app as a user attempts to book a flight. Each screen is annotated with an explanation of the features and process. The document displaying this can be found here: https://bit.ly/3gNhwmW
Prototyping and Wireframing: The final two stages of the project was to create a high-fidelity prototype of the app to allow user interaction and access any remaining pain points or changes that need to be made in the design. The interactive, high-fidelity prototype can be found here: https://bit.ly/3fnqeYJ
Once the high-fidelity prototype had been tested this was then turned into an annotated wireframe, which would allow developers to now pick up the project and build the customer facing app. These annotated wireframes can be seen here: https://bit.ly/bit.ly/3iTOI3C
Stoppers
The main stopper within this project was probably down to it being done for educational purposes and not a real world outcome. This limited the resources for research available to me, with better resources I could have done wider research with better technology to improve my findings at that stage and in turn produced a better outcome.
Outcome
The Fly UX app was designed to be a simple flight booking app that removes as many distractions as possible from the customer journey as many are found in similar apps that are on the market today. I believe that the outcome did some in a smooth and visually please way.
This case study also shows the need for UX Design to be fully supported by UX Research in order to reach the best possible outcome.
