#1 Competitive Benchmarking
Starting into a UX Design portfolio
I’m going to begin my postings on Medium platform as a series of my thoughts looking back on my progress through the UX Design Institute’s (UXDI)Professional Diploma in UX course, and specifically the Fly UX project. I’ll gradually add a bit of info about myself throughout the series, too.
The purpose of this being to organize my thoughts (and data) before compiling the actual case study for my portfolio site. It’s kind of a daunting task — even with all my project material neatly arranged. I have been shuffling from Adobe Portfolio to a Wordpress installation, and continually searching for other options. So far for simplicity, I may go ahead and use Adobe portfolio. Once I finish with this series of posts I hope to be in a better mind frame to get it sorted out snappy. I’m also preparing for the final exam at the same time. Killing two birds or three, or so on…
The Case Study: Fly UX
The brief is to create a mobile app, or website for a new Airline startup. The experience should be fast, easy, and intuitive. This experience should obviously be research based, taking into account the goals and needs of the target users. I chose to go down the mobile route for this project. At least to start with. My final goal being a working prototype that I could further test with users. Along with this, a set of detailed wireframes for handoff. Both these projects proved to be some of the most enjoyable, though also the most time consuming. But I’ll get to those way later.
Initial Benchmarking
The first research task was the Competitive Benchmark of four competitor airlines.
For the document I took initial notes while using each app. While typing them up/compiling them I used a simple Green (positive), Red (negative) traffic light system. I took screen shots, added them to the document and annotated it.
While creating this document I started to notice already some areas where apps are failing at. I hadn’t made this type of document before, though the UXDI Slack channel (that each student is invited to) has a room dedicated to peer review of the Competitive Benchmarking Project. At the time it didn’t really prove useful for myself. I kindly asked for feedback, only getting a few emoticons in reply. That channel has definitely become more active and useful lately though, as I see way more conversation there now. Maybe I got in on a bad day.
Either way, I was satisfied after completing this first project. I got the hang of the basic controls of Adobe XD (which wasn’t very hard to grasp really since I’m familiar with other Adobe software and had recently done a course on Sketch). Below is how I laid out the document — I found that horizontal layout of pages from top to bottom correctly outputs the page order when exporting to pdf.
The most valuable take was actually this document itself. It’s something I have referred back to over and over throughout the course: you’ll find it mentioned in the following projects again and again (if you read any more). Through writing up the competitive benchmark I was able to find how each Airline solves a similar problem and also how some fail at theirs.
I could observe and experience features that achieved their goals like the minimal flow through the KLM app. The KLM home screen goes direct to the flight booking. This was obviously something decided on through user research. If the app’s major use-case is to book a flight, then let’s make that prominent and start with that, while still letting other but less popular options such as boarding pass access and settings easy accessible.
On the other hand I could spot some features that failed such as the home screen of the Korean Air app; with repetitive and mismatched names of buttons with the exact same function, also far from minimal. If the idea of the UX process is to remove unnecessary options and steps, the latter of those airlines is failing.
Those are just two take aways from the whole 50+ page document. This document helped me with getting my head around user flow, conventions, and best practices. The document just really made me think about the flight booking process in so much detail. It prepared me well for what was to come in the next projects.
The document begins with the objectives and outlines the main areas to be assessed.
I then went on airline by airline and commented on their features and process. The document closes with a series of summaries. The first being colours and button elements.
Here I could also spot some common conventions regarding the UI of each app. How they commonly use colours; as their signature colour, backgrounds, button colours and states.
Lastly, I summarize the Home screens, Flight Search journey, and Payment and Details entry.
Summarizing such a large document of specifics is not an easy task really.
The summary results are largely subjective, but they are also comparative — allowing me to see side-by-side similar aspects or features of some very similar apps. This could allow me to pinpoint some specific features to work on very early on — which could also be solidified in the coming projects. This is just the beginning of the research phase and would be built on from here.
It’s a great exercise and research task. Definitely one that UXDI should consider making compulsory for the course.
You can find the document here if it is of interest to you ~
https://xd.adobe.com/view/06453d09-57eb-425b-66b8-bbbcd69b921c-7074/
And here’s me working (posing) on this project ~
