Travel Discussion Boards

Leanne’s Role: UX Research, UX/UI Design, Prototyping

Results: While this visual design solution was not 100% implemented due to technical limitations, it did result in the company creating an entire business charter around user experience and instilled company-wide dedication in putting the user first while supporting the company’s broader needs.

About the Project.

As part of my introduction to UX Design, I took a glass on User Experience Design from General Assembly in Boston, Mass.. What follows is the work I did for a class project.

Road Scholar participants are very excited to start planning their trips to all corners of the world. For many of them, this is their first experience with Road Scholar and they are anxious to see what their investment will bring them. They hope to find connections before the trip starts and get to know the people they will be traveling with for an extended period of time. Foster community and inspiration with an easy-to-use forum that allows users to find and respond to discussions about their unique interests.

The Problem

Discussion board participants were struggling to use the discussion boards to find and respond to discussions. Rather than a source of community and inspiration, the discussion boards became an echo chamber of highly visible questions and complaints from users.

The problems of the Road Scholar discussion boards were highly visible in the form of major complaints in the discussion board forums. The feedback ranged from “I can’t find my board” to “Road Scholar’s competitors do this better,” a very unnerving piece of information that we knew we needed to investigate further.

The Research

Competitive Analysis

In analyzing Road Scholar’s competitors, I made careful note of features, UI patterns and social application integration.

Additionally, out of my user interviews I discovered a few indirect competitors worth noting. These indirect competitors like Facebook Groups and personal email were being used as a stop-gap for the failings of Road Scholar’s discussion boards. In other words, when users were get frustrated on the boards, they would go and find each other on Facebook or exchange email addresses in order to get off the site entirely.

Now, there’s no way to directly compete with a giant like Facebook, but I hoped that by analyzing what users found easy to use about the social media platform, I could compare with what we currently had and do my best to improve it.

User Surveys

I posted to Road Scholar’s Facebook page and the Discussion Board homepage, asking folks to take a survey to learn some basic demographics of the discussion board user. I learned not only basic things like age and gender, but also pretty important things like what their main goals were in using the boards, how often they used them, on what kind of mobile device, and what other social media platforms they use.

User Interviews

Out of the surveys, I selected 6 frequent discussion board users to interview, hoping to learn about their attitudes towards forums run by Road Scholar and its major competitors. The questions I asked them included things like:

What do you think about the Road Scholar discussion boards? What do you like/dislike about them?
How often do you use them? How do you access them, with what device?
When do you log on to the boards? What time of day? What’s around you?
What do you use them for?
Do you try to meet your fellow participants? What do you want to know about them? What do you want them to know about you?
Have you ever used them to start a topic or discussion? What about?
What social media do you use? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it?

Developing Personas

From this information, I crafted these two user personas.

Dorie, a 68-year-old solo traveler with no grandchildren, loves to use discussion boards to meet her fellow travelers ahead of time. As a solo traveler and frequent user of the discussion boards, she really wants to connect with people before her trip and is frustrated by the lack of engagement on her trip’s date-specific discussion board.

June is a 74-year-old retired nurse who frequently travels with her husband Max (84), and uses the discussion boards to research trips and ask advice from other Road Scholars. Because of Max’s limited mobility, June wants to make sure that the activity level of the trip is appropriate from them. She is frustrated because she can’t seem to find the information she’s looking for.