_______ KEY OBSERVATIONS
Asking the right questions.
Research goals
In the begining, it was a personal pain point of myself and the team. After conversing with several colleagues we realized that in order to make a successful product, we would need to interview more than just people of our age group. People travel for many reasons, and being able to pin-point the struggles of multiple persona types would allow us to reverse engineer a better travel experience. We put our research efforts into three specific areas of study:
Planning a trip
Planning a trip can be tough. Especially if you have a family, kids, work, school etc. Whatever your situation is, making sure that the money and time allocated to the trip is going to be worth while requires a lot of planning upfront. While identifying our research goals, we realized that one of the biggest lessons that we could learn is how many people actually enjoy the planning and research of building out an itinerary for their trip.
Documenting a trip
While some people enjoy the act of logging their lives, others do not. When designing for these persona types, we wanted to learn more about why it is that people would or would not like to document their journey. Our original concept of what VacayBug could be, was a personal travel journal. However, after careful consideration we agreed that not everyone has the time or enjoys manually documenting their travel experiences.
Sharing a trip
Sharing is caring. In fact, this is one of the primary use cases that made the idea of VacayBug so attractive to us. We wondered if it was possible to package an entire trip and be able to share it with family and friends so that they felt like they were a part of the experience. If so, we would need to figure out a way to frame our questions so that we could identify what it is that could make people's travel experiences worth sharing with others.
Question areas
When doing user interviews, we began to identify a lot of patterns in people's answers. We quickly realized that keeping the questions vague was not the answer, so we decided to sit down and get laser focused about the problem areas that were related to planning, documenting and sharing a trip. Doing this greatly helped frame the conversation when asking potential users how they went about their traveling plans before, during and after.
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What is your main source for inspiration when looking to plan your future travel plans?
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How do you go about sharing your travel experiences with your family and friends?
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Do you build your own itineraries prior to going on vacation. If so, What tool do you use?
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Are you mostly interested in tourist attractions or do you seek to explore the more local centric areas?
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How do you go about planning a surprise trip with your significant other without them knowing?
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How do you stay up to date on the trips that your family and friends have been lately?
