AirAsia
4 Product Designers
2024 (Oct-Nov)
UX Design, Consulting, Research
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AirAsia MOVE is a travel app that helps users book flights, hotels, and more. It also has a "Communities" feature where travelers can share stories and connect with other travellers. (screenshot of current app)
I led a team of three other designers to come up with solutions to improve the user traffic of this feature.
Since AirAsia Move is a travel app, most users are not aware of the "communities" and those who joined struggle to see the benefits of this feature. This has led to very low activity and interaction within the Communities.
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AirAsia Move partnered with us to redesign the "Communities" feature to enhance user discoverability and encourage more meaningful engagement and social interactions.
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1. Design solutions that integrate with the existing app and design system.
2. Create value-added features that enhance user retention engagement.
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Explore how users currently find, join, and interact with Communities feature.
Discover how both social platforms and travel apps approach onboarding, community discovery, and user engagement.
Analyze social psychology of online communities to understand what motivates users to join and meaningfully engage.
Identify design elements like gamification, rewards, or navigation that can encourage participation.
Where are users struggling to find and use communities?
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How do social / travel apps enhance discoverability and sustain engagement?
These tests helped us identify challenges with discoverability and gain insights into how users prefer to engage with the feature.
“I wouldn’t have found communities in the app if it wasn’t mentioned”
“This feels like a bunch of random messages”
“There is a lot of spam messages and not a lot of content.”
“I’m scared to interact, it doesn’t feel safe.”
“Why would I use this feature, when I can look at travel blogs?”
After testing with 6 participants, the usability score was below average usability.
To better understand the onboarding, discovery, and features that encourage engagement in online communities as well as travel apps since AirAsia Move is both.
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We noticed the onboarding for communities on discord included welcome messages, rules, and easy interactions.
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The travel apps showed tool tips, offered search options, and offered a clear layout and preview of different categories.
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Based on our research findings, I led ideation workshops and client updates, which helped us develop "How Might We" statements to align our solutions with user needs and business goals.
In order to bring more engagement we first thought of moving the communities section to the home page, however after receiving feedback from our stakeholders and in order to stay within the business goals we ultimately had to find other ways to promote communities without changing the main menu and navigation bar.
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We started exploring default backgrounds in the chat to create a less intimidating community space.
The current Messages layout doesn’t effectively encourage users to join, so we explored alternative menu layouts to make the experience more intuitive and user-friendly.
Since communities were only accessible from “Messages,” we added more entry points on the homepage to improve visibility, while keeping the original menu and navigation bar unchanged.
Included chat previews to lower the barrier for new users, making communities feel more approachable and inviting.
We added more entry points during the initial flight booking process as well to increase the discoverability.
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Creating a personalized onboarding that can best help users find the communities that are best for their interests.
Added a welcome banner to confirm community membership and encourage users to introduce themselves and engage with others.
The welcome message highlights the community discussion topics, providing ideas for participation and interactions
We added a clickable “Guidelines” link for users to access full community rules, promoting safety and a welcoming environment.
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Introduced stockpiled emojis as a quick, intuitive way for users to engage with content without needing to send separate messages.
Added brief onboarding tool tips to guide users on what to expect and how to interact within the community.
Enabled threaded replies to keep conversations organized and ongoing. Added a search function to help users easily find past topics or content.
"This is a great way to connect with people when you are traveling!"
"It feels really welcoming and friendly!"
"I liked seeing the preview of the community before joining!"
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Incorporate points and gamification overlays to create a giveaway experience that encourages user participation and engagement.
Animations visually guide users through features, making learning more engaging and enjoyable, which boosts satisfaction and feature adoption.
As the lead designer, I led our ideation and brainstorming workshops, and we had great collaboration throughout the project. We prioritized a lot of high-impact, low-effort solutions since they were quick to implement, but I think next time we could scale down even more and focus on bigger, long-term impact solutions.
With a one-month timeline, we successfully tested with over 12 participants, which provided valuable insights. However, in the future, conducting more usability testing would allow us to gather additional user feedback and validate our solutions.
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