Fly With Me
A travel tracker app for instant notifications on your friend and family's travel status.
User Research, Competitive Analysis, Personas, User Testing
User Insights
Before I started with the design, I needed to better understand my users and their frustrations with the current options for travel tracker apps. I interviewed 8 frequent travelers, conducted a public survey for travelers, and observed travelers at airports to gather my user research
Discovery:
- Users find it difficult to remember specific flight information for a loved one’s flight. “I think they get in around 7, but I forget the flight number.”
- If a traveler gets moved to a different flight, they have to notify their family/friends with updated information. Often, travelers don't have time to send these updates.
- Traveler’s experience a lack of confidence that whoever is picking them up from the airport will be there on time.
Competitive Analysis
While there are many apps that offer flight tracking services, at the time of this design, there are no options that allow a user to track a specific flyer.
App in the Air does a great job of helping travelers organize all the information of their flight, from check-in times to landing times, gate numbers and more. This app is intended for the traveler, not the loved one keeping track of the traveler.
Now Arriving is an app for the loved one tracking the traveler that helps the user know when the flight is arriving and how long it will take to get to the airport from their location.
While these popular apps solve some problems, there is still a user frustration for frequent flyers who need to update their loved ones on changes to their specific travel itinerary.
Creating a Persona
Next up, I needed to create a persona to help guide my design decisions. Using my data collected from user research and competitive analyses, I created the persona of Riley. As I started thinking through my user journeys and the flow of the app, Riley's persona was always top of mind to ensure I kept to a user-first design.
User Flows
Using my persona as my guide and the data collected from my user and competitive research, I started defining the problems I needed to solve and the functions I needed to create to help solve these problems.
My users need to be able to:
- Add a contact with specific frequent flyer information
- See flight itineraries for specific contacts
- Receive updates with changes to specific traveler itineraries (not just changes to flights)
- Travelers need to be able to onboard quickly and efficiently
After defining my key features, I outlined different user flows for each task. I created at least 3 different versions for each task to ensure I thought through multiple user options. Once I selected what I thought were the best flows, I started to create Low-Fi Wireframes for prototype testing.
Prototyping & User Testing
Using Low-Fi wireframes, I began testing users to determine if the flows were intuitive and to note any confusion, likes and dislikes about the app’s features. I tested 10 different users, 5 frequent travelers and 5 significant others of frequent travelers. My first 3 users tested for Usability using paper sketches. For the rest of my users, I had them test for usability and accessibility using a clickable prototype I built on Invision.
What I hoped to learn:
- How did users feel about the on-boarding experience?
- When asked to complete a task, did the users take the steps I assumed they would? Or did they take a different route?
- Was there any confusion about the tasks that users were asked to complete?
- Note Likes and Dislikes about the features and flows
What I learned:
- Users felt like the On-boarding was easy, but travelers felt a little hesitant about entering in their Frequent Flyer # right away. "I need some sort of notification telling me that my info is safe and why it is being asked for and what they plan to do with it."
- Flows were completed with no confusion.
- Friends Tab-"Is that a contact list?"
In summary, I learned that I needed to add more tutorials throughout the on-boarding process so that users felt safe and understood the app's goals. While users completed the flows with no mistakes, they would have completed them with less hesitation if they had a confident knowledge about the app's layout.
What problems does Fly With Me solve?
Fly With Me is more than just another Flight Tracker app. Fly With Me keeps traveler information organized and sends notifications on specific traveler itineraries using a traveler’s assigned Frequent Flyer Traveler Number.
- Users no longer have to remember and search for specific flight numbers
- Travelers are stress-free and not rushed to send updates about altered flight itineraries
Future Features
- Enhanced UI
- Maps Integration
- "Leave By" Feature that will adjust timeline based on traffic and other factors to predict the most accurate location time arrival.
Feature Videos
- Adding a user to Fly With Me
- Receiving a notification
