A business trip is a type of travel that can be undertaken for a variety of job-related reasons: to meet or enteÇrtain clients; to visit other facilities within the same company, or to attend trade shows and seminars. Although the existence of teleconferencing and telepresence technologies has reduced the demand of sending an employee on a business trip, some businesses still see advantages in face-to-face contact for tasks like solving a manufacturing problem or signing a contract.
In a typical business trip, the traveller is required to finish all tasks and achieve related business goals against a tight schedule. Consequently, the project aims to improve efficiency and effectiveness of business trips by reducing the efforts on trifles in travel and helping workers concentrate on the more important tasks.
| Date: | 2015 |
| My Role: | UX Researcher, Project Host |
| Category: | UX Research |
| Member: | UX researcher: Ally Wang, George Cho |
The Research phase is key to creating an informed user experience. In order to explore the traveller demands in a business trip, firstly, I interviewed 8 employees and employers. I asked several questions which instruct them to present their experiences and their special memories in their trips. The transcripts were printed for the further analysis.
To draw insights from data collected during the research phase, capturing, organising and making inferences from the records can help UX designers begin to understand what travellers want and why. To help participating designers and product managers understand the end users and to build up communications between team members, Persona was created to outline the comprehension of target users. In Persona, I sketched the image of two target users, the business creator and manufacturing assistant, and described their actions, goal of the trip, devices they brought and the schedule. Details of the process are shown in the figures below.
By making inferences from the Analysis phase, I organized the whole business trip into three phases, the Plan phase, the Work phase and the Finalize phase. The Plan phase includes the period of scheduling and making arrangements before the traveller arrives at the destination. The Work phase starts when the traveller has arrived the destination and proceeds with his tasks. Lastly, the Finalize phase is the period that the traveller finishes his tasks and reports to his employer.
The user journey illustrates how travellers interact with their technical devices. User Journey describes at a high level of detail specific steps that different travellers take to complete a specific task during a business trip. The opinions of travellers at each step are also listed. Furthermore, I adjusted the regular user journey with the insights of opportunities, so that designers and product managers could more easily identify the potential services and build up the strategy.
