I championed the high-fidelity interactive prototype of the saving process
Sketches and wireframing for the Expedia Travel board redesign
Discussions, presentation, research, testing, documentation with the whole team throughout the project
Our design team explored how to integrate Expedia's lines of business (flights, hotel/vacation rentals, rental cars, activities) into different social media platforms. This could provide additional options for planning and booking travel while also increasing customer awareness for Expedia.
End-to-end user journey for a reimagined travel experience, starting from gathering inspiration from social media to sharing travel experiences to assist others in planning their vacation.
High-fidelity mockups showcasing the redesigned experience of Expedia Group and its social media integration.
We were first given information about what Expedia had already tried out: research on Gen Z travelers and influencer plans (S. Knab, personal communication, January, 20, 2023). The research that we focused on in our design process included:
Knowing how Expedia first approached this problem space, our team moved into researching how users gain and act upon travel inspiration from social media (particularly in Instagram).
After reviewing the secondary research to understand our problem area more of social media and monetization, we created an interview protocol to learn more about our user group’s travel booking process after travel inspiration, whether travel inspiration comes from social media, and their perceptions on influencers.
Our 10 interviews revealed that social media travel influencers are not the best way to create inspiration for social media users; rather, travel postings from family and friends is a great way to inspire users to create travel plans. Seeing various individuals that a user may be familiar with can create trust, which leads to interest, which then leads to inspiration. This inspiration then would influence a user to book a trip. We also found that users would like to have rewards for booking trips.
We decided to create a journey map (pictured below) to get a better understanding of the trip inspiration, planning, booking, and posting processes. From our research, we divided the user journey into 9 phases:
While our initial ideations and wireframes attempted to touch on many of the first phases, this journey map helped us narrow down our final solution to include only the most relevant phases of the user journey that align best with our project goals. Therefore, the two phases that we decided to focus on are 1) gaining travel inspiration and 2) posting travel experiences online.
Here were my sketches that targeted the Inspiration, During, and Posting phases of the travel process.
We designed our wireframes based on several different user flows we generated with our research and initial interviews. We also integrated the concepts we had sketched earlier into our initial wireframes. The different user flows we created helped us to explore the different parts of the user journey we found through our research, and the sketches provided us with concepts we could better flesh out through the wireframing process.
We initially conceptualized this part of the solution as Expedia widgets, or icons of Expedia activities that the user uploads, under the username bar.
Building off of the “widget” wireframes, my subgroup created more wireframes to be user tested further exploring this idea. Although our user testing revealed the widget concept to be ineffective, we later kept the popup showing the user’s Expedia Trips to add to and the confirmation popup at the bottom.
Here is one wireframe flow of Expedia widgets being shown once the user pulls down the username bar. After tapping an icon, more information is shown about the activity and the user can add that individual widget to a board.
Here is a wireframe flow saving an entire post to a board from the Share icon.
The insights we gained from user testing these wireframe flows were:
From this, we changed the Expedia widget to be an Expedia trip tag, which would show up like a username tag on a post.
After our initial round of A/B concept testing, we moved onto paper prototyping so that users could move around the design elements of Instagram and added Expedia design elements according to what made sense to them.
From left to right, we have a link popup from instagram, one post with a trip tag, another post with people tagged, a popup for “adding” things to your trip, and another picture with a trip tag.
In Instagram, users can see a button that a user can click on to see the people who are tagged in the post. In the same way, our team designed an “Expedia” button that a user could click on to see the travel “trip tags” that would be included in the “travel post”. The button contains the Expedia logo. This way, a user would know that in some capacity the post the user is looking at would be linked with Expedia.
From our paper prototyping, we found:
Moving on from these rounds of user testing, we created a high-fidelity interactive prototype according to Instagram’s location tags.
One part of our final design focused on users being able to save travel inspiration from social media to their Expedia Trip Board.
Since the social media platform we decided to use was Instagram, we composed a feature that included Expedia tags within an Instagram post. A location tag will be visible on the post, just like an account tag.
When the tag is pressed, it will show the location of that event on a map. This map is already a feature in Instagram. Below the map, it will show some details of that event, such as the name of the event, the price, and some related Instagram posts.
It will also allow the user to visit the Expedia website, as well as add the event to their Expedia Trip Board.
The Expedia website will first come up as a pop-up webpage within Instagram, but if the user wants to visit the website in their browser app, they will be able to do that as well.
Our more experimental ideas with Expedia widgets failed due to a lack of explanation and Expedia branding. People weren’t sure how to interact with our previous iterations because they were so different from how Instagram worked.
We used Instagram’s already existing features make sure these new “Expedia trip tags” would smoothly integrate into Instagram's established design language. Expedia branding is clear with the trip tags and “Add to Trip Board” so people could develop more trust in the brand.
During our paper prototype testing, users disliked the Instagram webpage popup feature as they would immediately close out. Therefore, we didn't make viewing an external link necessary for users to save things to their Trip Boards.
The amount of redirections we had to do was challenging but fun. For instance, the team had to spend a lot of time outside of class to sketch and re-iterate ideas in order to make sure all bases were covered, and a lot of our initial work regarding the Trip Board redesigns was later abandoned because of time constraints and because they didn’t directly contribute to our project goals.
However, I still enjoyed the process and end result! We started from scratch due to paper prototyping, which was a method I hadn't used for an extended experience studio project like this. Because we were working within Instagram's design system, we could come up with a narrower and more specific solutions. Finally, I was also able to work with Figma's animations and interactions in the high-fidelity prototyping to really get our detailed solution across.
A better onboarding experience would include a recommendation system that will provide users with other suggested trip postings on Instagram, such as lodging, activities, renting a car, and dining out.
While we focused on the posting and saving flow on Instagram, if we had more time, I'd want to continue our redesigns for Expedia's trip boards, and make the trip board process more collaborative with family and friends. This would allow us to explore other important parts of the traveler journey map, such as with booking and during the actual trip
Finally, as we didn't fully evaluate our final high-fidelity designs, we would have done more user testing to see if our solution was viable.
