Not dazed, not confused:
Increasing clarity in the booking flow

We're not here to wink at the dark.

Context

AirAsia wanted to increase the click-through rate and NPS score of their Flight and Hotel booking flow in their MOVE super app.

Strategic value

Delivered UX research insights and reiterations across key touch points on the Flight and Hotel Package booking flow to increase usability and user confidence to book.

Objective

  • To uncover usability issues in the funnel
  • To increase clarity in the package's value proposition and funnel
  • To discover what group and family travellers expect to see when booking flights and hotels

Results

  • 40% increase in confidence learning the booking process
  • 27% decrease in perceived complexity
  • 49% decrease in time taken to confirm or change flights from the payment page

Our UX Journey with AirAsia MOVE on their Flight and Hotel Package Booking Flow

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The Focus

  • The Flight and Hotel package booking flow, located in the AirAsia MOVE mobile app

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The Gathered Problem

  • How might we make the booking flow more intuitive and pleasant for users, so that users are more confident in booking a Flight and Hotel package through AirAsia MOVE’s app?

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Proposed Solutions from our UX Research

1. Make the booking flow clearer

2. Make the value proposition more apparent

3A. Adapt to information-seeking behaviours of general group travellers

3B. Adapt to information-seeking behaviours of parents

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Our Results

Our prototype helped users gain confidence in planning their travels.
Research has found that is crucial for pushing conversions.

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Our UX Research Process

1. Heuristic evaluation

2. Competitive analysis*

3. Market and behaviour research*

4-5. Moderated usability testing of the client’s app, and user interviews

6. Survey*

7. Moderated usability test of our first prototype*

8. Unmoderated usability test of our first prototype

9. Design (Re)Iteration

* indicates key areas I helmed

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1 Innovation: Overview Page

Great news: this reduced time taken to amend details from the payment page by 49%.

Making it easier for users to change their mind

We introduced a new booking overview page after users selected their Flight and Hotel. This page allowed users to amend their Flight and Hotel details easily without restarting the entire booking flow.

Why this is important: Planning is important to the user pre-booking process. Allowing changes to easily be made while window shopping will reduce user frustration. Importantly, accommodating errors and changes for such high-stake purchases will increase conversion.

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1 Reiteration: Adding Rooms

Great news: the number of users adding rooms increased from 0 out of 5, to 4 out of 5 with our first iteration.

Our next reiteration can automate the room number increasing as number of guests increase

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Why this is important: The number of rooms input for search determines the prices that users see as they browse for Flight and Hotel packages. This presents a severe issue as users with wrongly input rooms often don't realise that (A) prices reflected are inaccurate, and (B) they have booked only 1 room.

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My Takeaways

1.     Mixed research methods create stronger solutions

I enjoyed being the main driver of our non-user testing research.  By making connections across our findings, I could propose nuanced and well-evidenced design choices throughout our reiteration process.

2.    Read other people's research

The research method I especially found great value in was market and behaviour research as they provided insights for customer segments we had little access to in the project’s short timeframe (e.g. Indonesian travellers, senior travellers), and deepened the insights we found from our own research.

3.    Work closely with engineers, product managers, and business teams when reiterating solutions

A user who was a senior software engineer provided rich perspectives about our solutions from a programming perspective.

The client’s quarterly business focus also guided our priorities in the research process, though we could have scoped this further to just families due to our tight timeline.

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My Next Steps for the Project

1. Consider internationalisation

Further reiteration of UX copy and its accompanying UI design require a closer look at how they translate across the app's various languages.

I also want to analyse any differences in booking flow or UI/UX, especially in Indonesian and Malay (as per the client's core market).

2. Scope our research further to focus on family travel

As it was not easy seeking out parents of young children as our key users, we focused more on groups than families, though we value-added our solutions with both.

Moving on, I would test our reiterated prototype with more parents, breaking the segment further into parents of infants (0-3 years old), and parents of older children (4-8, and 9-12 years old). Scholarly research I found stated that much travel research groups children from 0-12 years old together, but their travel needs greatly differ by age.