Depth Interviews and Usability tests

The majority of the research insights came from depth interviews and benchmark usability tests. We were provided with two pre-recorded interviews/usability tests from which I made detailed notes on the goals, context and behaviours of people booking flights, and also observed them booking flights on the Aer Lingus and Eurowings websites. I was able to confirm mental models, identify pain points, conventions and positives along the flight booking process.

Although I had a good sense of exactly what insights I was looking for, recording these in a concise and easy to understand way was a learning curve. As one of the first projects I tackled, it was carried it out early in the course, and in hindsight, I could have spent more time refining my note taking skills before tackling the project. Each interview contains large amounts of usable data, and condensing this into an easily readable report is something that comes with practice.

As a result, there were at least two or three revisions of the final report. While this may have been good for my understanding of the users, if I was to repeat the project now having learnt how to make effective notes, it would be completed in a much shorter time.

Both the pre-recorded interviews provided me with a really good understanding of the flight booking process, and what I found was that combined with my own initial ideas, the survey results, the competitive benchmark and informal conversations with friends about booking flights, I was able to start identifying the key issues I wanted to focus on while I was taking the notes. So even though I hadn’t formally begun to analyse the research, I was having thoughts and making notes which formed the basis of my own scripts for my own interviews and usability tests, and planning what areas I wanted to explore with my own participants.

Rather than the different research methods taking place in isolation, it felt more like a one integrated process, with each part of the research supporting and strengthening the others, so the useful insights and therefore my understanding of the flight booking process seemed to grow exponentially.

For example, when I first began the projects, based on my own experience and informal conversations with friends and family, I knew I wanted to learn more about how passengers communicated with each other, and this led me to focus on the trip-planning process. I wanted to learn about exactly what happens from the moment a user decides to go on a trip, and discover how flight booking fitted into those plans. This informed my survey questions, and gave me a clear focus for the note taking project and my own interviews.

Likewise, I was interested in how users came to a decision on what was the best day to travel, and how flight availability affected this. This informed many key decisions on the final design of the results page.

Here are the pdfs of the final reports on the pre-recorded interviews, and below are the recordings of my own usability sessions. I have also included the scripts and notes I made before carrying out my own interviews, which show how my research up to that point informed the areas I wanted to explore further.

Depth interview / Usability test 1

The requirement for the course was to carry out one usability session, however I had more than one participant in mind that I knew would provide useful insights because of their unique scenarios. It was lucky I did, because despite my previous experience in both photography, video AND sound/dialogue recording, I somehow managed to mess up both the audio and the camera feed of the user.

Despite the technical hitches, Lesley provided a great interview, and many of the insights from this session became part of the overall design. Here is the full session. The laptop microphone unfortunately didnt pick up my voice very clearly, but it was still an extremely useful session. The pdf write up is below.

Depth interview / Usability test 2

The second usability session also resulted in great insights from Rachel. She regularly books holidays away with friends, and had recently been to a wedding in Portugal with a group of fifteen. This meant I could learn a lot about trip planning, and how this was carried out as part of a large group.

Like many flyers, she also has a keen sense of getting a good price, and she perfectly demonstrated the reason why I believe the results page should show days either side of the search date, and users should also be able to choose both outbound and return flights at the same time, above the fold. This same point in the session also perfectly illustrated a central concept I proposed regarding the factors which inform a users decision on which flights to choose – price takes priority, unless something else does.