Insight into innovative UX development practices

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Learn about best practices for an impactful UX Design Discovery Phase. Gathering and leveraging information is one of the essential skills in a UX designer’s toolbox. It’s crucial to define goals and identify what needs to be learned from users to gain valuable, helpful insights as a basis to create appealing and effortless experiences. Not often does a project budget allow for full research, but there are a few methods which can gain information about users.

• Finding user perspectives with netnography. With over 4 billion people travelling annually, there is no shortage of social media posts and online forums available to gain opinions of travellers. Immersing yourself into user conversations provides an excellent starting point to generate questions and pain points for further research.
• Guerrilla research. It’s important for UX designers to reach into the users’ world as we may have pre-existing biases. Speaking with acquaintances (or even strangers in a relevant space) is a quick way of gaining insights that match our desired user profiles. Simple conversations let us understand the problem area better to produce value for later stages of research.
• Benchmarking. Whilst we always look across the travel industry to see how others solve similar problems, it’s doesn’t always yield new thinking. Reaching outside the industry can provide new paradigms which aid our problem solving.

Get out of the box to think out of the box

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The industry standard isn’t always the best approach. Recently, Branchspace was looking into how to enhance a multi-city booking experience. In our initial user research, we found that multi-city functionality didn’t exactly align to how a person would plan a trip. Most experiences are quite overwhelming and are often a lot of work for a user to complete. In our benchmarking, we went outside of the industry approach and realised we could simplify the process by adapting solutions from route planning apps (e.g., Google Maps, Uber), which customers use on almost a daily basis.  In doing so, we can provide a far better and familiar experience for a user, while making for an easier and more understandable user flow.