Asiana Airlines

Book your flight in one sight

FINAL PROTOTYPE

Overview

Context

Type: UX & UI Design

Duration: 3 weeks | Dec 2017

Team: 4 members

Service: Asiana Airlines Desktop

We looked into Asiana Airlines, one of South Korea’s two major airlines, as our redesigning focus after evaluating important components that we found could be better accomplished. Since discovering tickets is the first step to traveling users, we specifically looked into streamlining the flight search engine.


Problem

How might we provide a more consistent, productive way of searching for flight tickets?

Through user interviews and preliminary analysis of other travel sites, we found that users struggled through the first step of booking flight tickets. Because of its tedious and inconsistent design, many novice and even expert users may instead use a travel meta-search engine site, such as Expedia, due to its familiarity, suggestive format, and ease of use. As Steven Krug mentioned, “If it’s not clear in the first few seconds, interpreting everything else on the page is harder, and the chances are greater that [users may] misinterpret something and get frustrated.”


Role

Position
  • UX Researcher
  • UI/UX Designer
Tools
  • Pen & Paper
  • Sketch
  • Invision

Skills
  • User Observations
  • Task Scenario
  • Interface Design
  • A/B Testing

process

Phase 1
  • Select Concept
  • Needfinding
  • User Observations
  • User Interviews
    •
    Phase 2
  • Heuristics
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Wireframing
  • UI Design
    •
    Phase 3
  • Interaction Design
  • Hi-Fi Prototyping
  • A/B Testing
  • Usability Testing
    •

    Hover to see more and select to navigate

    1st phase

    Concept & Observations

    By selecting the travel search engine box as our redesigning focus, we formed a task scenario with the user goal of searching for flight tickets.

    TASK SCENARIO
    1. Imagine you’re going on a 2-week family trip to Korea in December. Search for their flight tickets in the cheapest way possible.
    2. Assume you’ll stop by another country before arriving to Korea.
    3. Now imagine that you’ll only need to visit Korea and purchase return tickets another time.

    Then, we conducted user observations with 3 participants while having them think-out-loud and took notes of how they naturally use and interact with the interface. Below are some of the observation notes:

  • User tries to type in his departure location, but realizes that he isn’t able to type anything in the form field

  • “Oh, that’s weird that the form looks like it’s already filled out”

  • “What does ‘Adult1’ mean?”

  • User notes that the interface looks very clunky and outdated

  • “It leads me to another page, and I have to start all over again”

  • User has to click on several things before the menu they want pops up

    • User Interviews

    After observing the users, we asked them follow-up questions to have a better understanding of their background and experience. Some of the questions asked were:

    1. How frequently do you travel by plane?
    2. Have you ever used Asiana Airlines to book tickets? If so, when was the last time you’ve used it?
    3. Do you use any other travel site other than this one? Which one and why?
    4. When is the last time you’ve purchased flight tickets?
    5. What are some good aspects you’ve seen with the site we tested?
    6. What are some improvements or suggestions you would like to recommend?

    We found out that many were confused of the current format and there was a lot of room for improvement due to its old-fashioned design. This meant that we needed to analyze other travel sites that the participants were familiar with and incorporate what we’ve found useful into our redesign.

    2nd phase

    Heuristics

    We were able to learn what many users struggled with through user research and proceeded to analyze the heuristics of the the current interface.

    Error Prevention

    When user left a form field blank or incorrectly on accident the system only prevents this after it’s been submitted.

    User Control & Freedom

    User isn’t able to perform specific actions they assume might work, such as typing in the departure location or freely exiting out of a dialogue.

    Consistency & standards

    User saw that multi-city option redirects him to another page, which wasn’t consistent with one-way and round-trip options.

    system & real world match

    User had difficulty understanding why numbers of Adults were displayed as Adult1, Adult2, and so on instead of conventional listing of numbers.

    Many of our usability problems arose from these heuristic issues, and we aimed to fix by making the design clear and intuitive.

    Interface Design

    By looking at other sites interviewees have mentioned and meta-search sites like Expedia, StudentUniverse, and Kayak, we found out that there are 2 common ways of approaching this issue: all-in-one interface and step-by-step multi-interface.

    While I worked on wireframing the all-in-one design (1st prototype), the other designer worked on the step-by-step approach (2nd prototype). Factors like saving and suggesting information and visual representation through brand-consistent icons were considered to make the process more usable and simple.

    3rd phase

    Hi-Fi Prototyping

    We focused on enhancing the efficiency and consistency through 2 different prototypes and see which design travel users may prefer.

    1ST PROTOTYPE
    2ND PROTOTYPE

    Both prototypes combined one-way, roundtrip, and multi-city options, since users did not like being redirected to a different landing page. In our second prototype, we tried a different and quite unconventional approach and thought that users would focus on one part of the search at a time, helping eliminate the possibility of human errors.

    A/B Testing

    Afterwards, we conducted user testing with the two different prototypes with a similar task scenario, and had the users go through the experience of both.

    PROTOTYPE 1

    Information is well organized

    All information is on the same page, leading to easy access/viewing for users

    Many options available to accelerate the search process

    Multi-city page could improve on visual distinction between different flight segments

    PROTOTYPE 2

    User can easily focus on one information each time

    Less likely for user to make mistakes

    Unable to review all information while going through the process

    Lack of indication of system status (how many inputs are needed)

    Although a multi-step design could possibly lower the efficiency of the process since users have to fill in information one step at a time, we thought that the overall efficiency would not be greatly influenced because users still need to input the same information they normally would have in any other circumstance.

    conclusion

    aftermath

    Overall, both of the prototype solutions we came up with had their own merits. Though through A/B testing, Prototype 1 was the preferred redesign, Prototype 2 could have been a better option if we had more time to test and iterate to make improvements.

    Since the project was completed, Asiana Airlines had recently changed its UI. The interesting fact is that they still kept the multi-city option on a separate page, and this probably had to do with preventing human errors or coding difficulties since it is a complex process that needs accurate, detailed inputs.

    Takeaways

    It was challenging to research, design, and test in the span of 3 weeks, but it was rewarding to see the whole process of finding what we can fix, redesign, and improve by interacting with the users. I learned that it’s more than essential to include your users in the design process to gain insightful feedback, allowing us to improve through users’ point of view.