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Expedia Group

Enhancing Expedia Group's Reach: Integrating Social Media for Seamless Travel Planning

Project Scope

  • Stakeholders: Young Millieanls
  • Timeframe: 5 months. Jan - May 2023
  • My Role: UX Researcher/Designer
  • Team: Ananya Desai, Andrew Dobler, Ellie Starzak, Jack Gerber, Jennifer Du, Mikaela Thompson, Sean Levy, Tori Jakpa, Damaris Adeniji
  • Methods:  Research, Interview, Sketches,  User Persona, Wireframe, Low Fidelity, Usability Testing
  • Tools: Miro, Figma, Canva, Zoom, Google Meet

Problem Statement

Limited Integration with Social Media Platforms

Reduced Accessibility to a Larger Consumer Audience

Opportunities for Trip Planning and Booking Not Fully Explored

My Role

Role

UX Designer, Researcher, User Persona, User Flow, Sketching, Storytelling, Ideation, Wireframes, low fidelity, User Testing, Prototyping

 

Solution

1. We enhance user’s confidence in booking travel plans and experiences

2. Foster customer loyalty to position Expedia as a dependable source for users

3. Increase Expedia’s website traffic and bookings while driving revenue for Expedia

Tags 1

Flows 1

This is an interactive prototype showcasing design rationale explanations.

Solution 

The outcome involves seamlessly integrating Expedia tags into Instagram posts. Users can add Expedia tags alongside regular tags, enhancing travel storytelling on Instagram and linking directly to Expedia for additional details.
 

Saving travel inspiration through social media

Uploading travel experiences on social media

Research

User Trust and Platform Integration

Understanding the problem area revealed significant insights into user trust dynamics, especially regarding travel influencers and platform integration. The primary research takeaway is the pivotal role of user trust in shaping travel decisions. This trust deficit, particularly in influencers, highlights an opportunity for platforms like Expedia to bridge the gap and become not just booking tools but sources of genuine inspiration.

Key Point

Influencer Distrust

  • Millennials users, are skeptical of influencers due to concerns about transparency and financial motivations.

  • The abundance of online content contributes to questioning the credibility of travel recommendations.

Platform Utilization Challenge

  • Expedia's trip board feature is a potential solution for streamlined travel planning.
    Users may resist switching platforms, emphasizing the need for seamless integration and compelling incentives.

Social Media and Search Engine Influence:

  • Social media's search engine-friendly nature amplifies user skepticismEncouraging user discernment, fostering influencer transparency, and prioritizing trustworthy content are essential trust-building measures.

Interview

Our team conducted 8 interviews with Millennials to gain a better understanding about the source of travel inspiration. We also gained insight on how users can book travel experiences and what that journey would look like. 

Key Point

Influencer Ineffectiveness

Interest & Inspiration Sources

Trust-Building Challenges

Family & Friend's Influence

Sketches

 Following our secondary research, we brainstormed ideas utilizing our key findings on factors influencing travel decisions. Then, we collectively decided to generate a total of 36 design concepts. 

User Persona

John, 28 - year - old 

He is a single man who regularly uses social media, especially Instagram, in his free time. 
 

His Frustrations

He struggles with trusting influencers who promote their travel experiences because he suspects they're paid for it. He ignores their posts and keeps scrolling until he stumbles upon his brother's post. John places more trust in his brother than the influencers he had encountered, leading him to conduct additional research on the potential travel destination using Google.
Establish an actionable plan moving forward with identified areas for ideation.
 

User Journey Map

How can we help travelers trust influencers and use their pasts as an inspiration to travel with Expedia

A user journey map was created to get a better understanding of the trip inspiration, planning, booking, and posting processes. 

From our research and interview, we divided the user journey into 9 phases:

‘Inspiration’, ‘Research’, ‘Plan’, ‘Book’, ‘Track’, ‘Arriving’, ‘During’ (a trip’, ‘Return’, and ‘Posting Online’.

This journey map helped us to 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. 

Then we made Whiteboard sketches of the future app screens based on our journey map

Wireframe

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

Following the creation of our wireframe flow, the team was divided into three groups, each focusing on distinct areas of the wireframe.

UX Designer Critique 

  • There were too many screens that made it difficult to flow 

  • Make it seamless for anyone to use

  • Reduce contents on the screens

Findings

​After having a review section with the clients representatives, Expedia’s UX Designers, we noticed how difficult it was for us the designer/researcher to navigate some features.

Low-Fidelity

Our team did both digital and paper prototypes
 

Digital Prototype

Usability Testing

  • Testing was conducted with 6 participants

  • Face-Face - five participants 

  • Online - one participants

Participants were asked:

  • Open the app

  • Click the widgets

  • Figure out where to go

  • Do you see the next in the widgets

  • What is confusing

Paper Prototype

Findings

  • Regarding the widgets we asked our users, it was brought to our attention that there was a need for a change in how to view the information linked to the widgets.

  • We found out that we needed to spend more time figuring out how the user would access the "widgets”

  • In the paper prototype we received feedback that we needed to focus on how the widgets would be accessed and seen by the users on Instagram

Conclusion On The Project "Key Learning and Insights"

1. Solving simple-seeming problems can make a big difference in someone's life. It was great to hear from users about how they'd use this app.
2. This experience shown us that using straightforward tags can really inspire people to want to travel more. 
3. Regularly iterating and validating our designs helps us learn and improve. Going through iterations and getting feedback made me think creatively, thus, developing a better designs for my team.​

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