Brief

I completed this project for my Professional Diploma in UX (User Experience) Design with the UX Design Institute. The brief was to research airline websites or apps then develop a new user interface that tackled the problems faced by users. As the project is long I’ve broken this case study into several sections. This section focuses on the analysis of my user research findings.​​​​​​​

“A problem well-defined is a problem half solved”

John Dewey

Project

Affinity Diagram

By creating an Affinity Diagram, I began to make sense of all the findings. As this is ideally a collaborative exercise, I asked some friends to help by reviewing my research and taking notes. Cora and I then wrote one finding on each post-it note and added them to the wall. We used LucidChart to allow my remote friend Matthew to contribute. Cora and I then transferred Matthew’s points onto post-it notes for the wall.

We used colour-coded post-it notes for different types of findings:

• Blue: Context;
• Pink: Pain point;
• Green: Good practice;
• Yellow: Question.

Once we had run out of points, we began organising the findings into categories. After a few debates, we finalised and named the categories. Many of the categories fitted quite nicely into the next stage of the project: developing the Customer Journey Map.

Customer Journey Map

First I entered all the findings from the Affinity Diagram into an Excel spreadsheet, allowing me to add columns, rows and comments as required. Once I had refined the content, I began sketching out the ‘look’ of the customer journey map. After a few tweaks, I created the final version in Adobe InDesign.

Conclusion

The affinity diagram organised all the information into manageable chunks, showing both good and bad elements of the current UX. Some issues would affect the entire site’s design. The Customer Journey Map lays out the problems to be tackled at specific stages of the flight booking process.

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