UX Challenge #6: Journey Mapping the Flight Deals Experience

As part of a Daily UX Challenge from Portfolio Builders, I created a detailed user journey map for an airline flight deals app. This exercise allowed me to deeply understand the end-to-end experience of users searching for and booking discounted flights — uncovering key pain points, emotions, and decision-making patterns. By translating research insights into a visual journey, I gained actionable guidance for designing a more transparent, trustworthy, and user-friendly flight booking experience.

Scenario

You were hired as a freelancer to do some user research and design for an airline flight deals website (competitors are Kayak and Expedia).As part of the design process, you need to dive into the user experience of finding and securing a discount flight. You’ll be looking for pain points, opportunities, and touch points.

Task: Create a journey map for the process of buying an airline flight through a deals app. You’ll want to use other research methods such as user interviews or diary studies to gather data. Then you’ll use the journey map to show what you’ve found.

Research Approach

To deeply understand the user experience of booking discounted flights, I employed two primary research methods: User Interviews and Competitive Analysis. Each method offered unique insights to uncover user behaviors, pain points, and opportunities for design improvements.

User Interviews

I conducted qualitative interviews with 7 participants representing frequent and budget-conscious travelers. The interviews focused on their booking habits, challenges, and preferences. The goal was to learn about real user motivations, frustrations, and decision-making processes.

Here are the 7 interview questions asked, along with illustrative summary answers:

1. How do you usually search for discounted flights?
2. What frustrations do you encounter during flight booking?
3. How do you decide which flight deal to book?
4. Have you ever abandoned a booking? If yes, why?
5. What features do you wish flight deals apps had?
6. How do you feel about payment security and confirmation?
7. Describe your experience with post-booking support.

These interviews helped identify emotional highs and lows, trusted touchpoints, and pain points at each stage of the user journey.

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis examined 6 flight deals and booking platforms to identify their direct or indirect competition status, key features, company advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, threats, and similar capabilities.

What I aimed to learn from each method:

• User Interviews:

I aimed to uncover the real behaviors, emotions, frustrations, and decision-making criteria users experience when searching for and booking discounted flights. I wanted to understand their pain points, what makes them trust or distrust an app, and what features or improvements would make their experience smoother and more enjoyable.

• Competitive Analysis:

The goal was to identify the key features and capabilities offered by both direct and indirect competitors like Kayak, Expedia, and Google Flights. I sought to uncover each company’s strengths and weaknesses, spot opportunities for differentiation, and recognize threats to the flight deals app. Understanding the market landscape helped ground design decisions in competitive realities.

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With these insights gathered, the next stage involved creating a detailed user persona to represent typical users, followed by mapping out the entire user journey. This visual journey map would crystallize the research findings into clear stages, actions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities that guide actionable UX improvements for the flight deals app.

User Persona

Insights From User Persona

• Maya is highly motivated by finding transparent, affordable flight deals quickly without hidden surprises.
• She experiences frustration and anxiety when faced with unclear pricing, overwhelming options, and confusing app interfaces.
• Trust plays a critical role for Maya, especially during payment and confirmation; security cues and instant feedback are essential.
• Support accessibility after booking is important, as unresolved issues undermine her confidence in the service.
• Maya values personalization, such as tailored deal recommendations based on her preferences and travel history, to reduce decision fatigue.

Next Step

The next step is to create a detailed user journey map for Maya. This map will visually represent her end-to-end experience in searching, comparing, and booking discount flights. It will highlight key actions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities at each stage, guiding targeted UX improvements to enhance satisfaction and trust in the flight deals app.

Journey Mapping

Key Insights from the User Journey Map

• Users feel curious and hopeful during the initial deal discovery but can quickly become overwhelmed due to too many options and unclear pricing.
• Decision making is hampered by price inconsistencies and hidden fees, creating anxiety and caution in the review and booking stage.
• The payment process is a critical pain point, with users feeling nervous or impatient due to distrust in security or slow confirmation.
• Post-purchase, users either feel relieved if the process was smooth or frustrated if support is difficult to reach or confirmations delayed.
• Transparency, simplicity, and trust-building throughout the process emerge as the biggest opportunities to improve user satisfaction.
• Personalized deal recommendations and instant support can delight users and reduce decision fatigue and anxiety.

Design Recommendations

1. Simplify Price Comparison and Filter Experience:

Streamline the search and comparison screen by reducing clutter and using clear visuals to highlight total prices, including all fees upfront. Implement smart default filters and easy toggles to reduce decision fatigue.

2. Make Fees and Policies Transparent:

Provide an interactive and clearly visible price breakdown, including taxes, baggage fees, and refund policies, at every step before checkout. Avoid any “fine print” surprises to build trust and reduce anxiety.

3. Add Personalized Alerts and Instant Support:

Offer deal notifications based on user history and preferences. Incorporate one-click immediate customer support access and fast booking confirmation notifications to enhance user confidence post-purchase.

Reflection

This challenge reinforced how travel booking is an emotional and sometimes stressful experience for users, driven by concerns over price transparency and trust. Mapping Maya’s journey emphasized the necessity of clear communication and simplicity to improve satisfaction. From a design perspective, user research remains vital to uncover nuanced pain points and shape targeted, user-centered solutions.

Conclusion

Mapping the flight booking journey revealed key friction points alongside moments of delight, guiding actionable improvements for a more intuitive and trustworthy deals app. This project highlighted the power of empathy-driven design in solving complex user needs.

Thank You for Reading!

Thank you for taking the time to explore this user journey mapping case study. I hope the insights and design recommendations sparked ideas for your own UX projects.