Adding a new feature to Skyscanner

My challenge of this third week of Ironhack was adding a new feature to Skyscanner app.

Skyscanner is a meta search engine and travel agency founded in 2001 based in Edinburgh, Scotland and owned by Trip.com Group, the largest online travel agency in China.

Briefing

The briefing of the new feature was: “Being able to look for flights depending on my passions. E.g. if I love music festivals, being able to search for a trip depending on which festivals will be in that month”

I started my journey by asking around opinions on the new feature and I found out that 70% of the users had a positive approach to this new feature. The other 30% said they wouldn't find so interesting, but if it was there they might use it someday.

Competitor Analysis

When researching about what other companies were doing and if they would offer this feature, I found out that Expedia offers this service, but only based on your chosen destination. So you are not able to look for your interests first. Kayak and Booking offer the same services as Skyscanner and also don't have the ability to search on favorite activities.

User Flow

After all this collected data I was able to create a Persona for the user flow process. My persona is Luisa, she is 35 years old and works as a screenwriter. Luisa has a passion: Traveling. Almost all the money she saves goes to her next traveling destination. She is also very active and recently started to run which became a passion. Luisa work as a freelancer in many projects.

So when thinking about a path for Luisa's journey on the app I simply thought about her new passion: running. What would be valuable for her in this case? What other interests she also might have? Here is a little history to illustrate this process:

1. Luisa is thinking about traveling soon and opens Skyscanner app.
2. At the welcome screen she sees that they have this new feature of searching for interests.
3. Then she clicks on sports, maybe she can find some running event.
4. Luisa realizes they have a category: Running, which is exactly what she was looking for!
5. When selecting the label she receives the information that the next running event is a Marathon in Berlin. She clicks right away on the CTA button to chose that event.
6. She is being redirected to a page to fill her departure location and other details.
7. After filling this a page opens with all flight options for that event, and eventually she picks one of them.
8. She is now being redirected to the flight company's website.

Illustration of the User Flow

Wireframing Mid-fi

After low-fi first sketches, it was time for starting to draw the mid-fi version of the app. After a study of the app’s architecture, I found out there is a space called: Explore. In the first version, I inserted into this category the new feature: Passions.

The users gave some really valuable feedback about this first trial which I consider the first fail. That's good because we can quickly do the adjustments to the prototype without expending more energy and time. For the sake of this week's challenge I had to do the changes already on the Hi-fi.

Learnings: the feature was tricky to find, hidden in the Explore tab. It was not very clear that you had to click on Passions to see your preferred activities.

It is a feature that deserves to be in a Spotlight right on the homepage. It can belong to the Navbar section: Explore, yet it needs more visual appeal to it.