Case Study: Tristar Worldwide reservations app
Design of Tristar’s mobile booking application on iPhone (iOS7) Part of the project team reporting to the marketing manager.
Starting the project
My first objective was to get as much information as possible about:
- Competitors in the transport industry.
- Similar apps already in the market.
- Our users.
I created a mock board/competitor analysis document with some of the leading players in the industry.
I also collected information about similar apps present on the Apple and Google markets and extracted and analysed the feedback left by their users using affinity walls.
By the end, I got a clear idea of the ecosystem where the new app was going to live.
Research
One of the main issues in Tristar was that the company was against asking customers for feedback, so face to face interviews was not an option.
My approach to being little disruptive and respect the business position, I organised a co-design workshop to identify the user needs with some stakeholders including some of our most important customers such as Virgin, British Airways and Emirates.
Design and testing
With user needs identified, I started mapping the current user journey.
Once the journey was mapped, I made an exercise of simplification trying to identify pain points and removing them.
I presented the new flows to the director’s board for sign-off.
After agreeing on them, I was ready to start design in more detail; there were three well-defined iterations.
From sketches to wireframes
I first sketched the new app on post-its.
After getting feedback from the team and the developers I wireframed the main journeys.
Using as a reference the ten heuristics of Jakob Nielsen I asked a group of UX designers from our partners to provide me with their expert opinion.
Wireframes
I used Axure at this stage first I converted the initial sketches into basic wireframes and added some crude interactivity to navigate between screens.
Using guerrilla research I went to Heathrow Airport to find some potential users and was able to talk to 4 of them, finding issues mostly related with:
- the main menu layout and
- the presentation of the content to the user (Travel time, time at the airport…)
Design
After the first wireframes in Axure, we went through 10 more iterations. Each time going one step further in the UI. Experimenting with different patterns.
Same way as the sketches I pop-up tested the different versions in Heathrow and Gatwick and used the feedback to update the next version.
