Phil Oye

We started by looking at our users. Rather than thinking about leisure travelers as being distinct from business travelers, we thought about a single user—the frequent business traveler wearing many “hats” (sometimes traveling for business, sometimes for leisure).

Developing personas

But thinking about the audience in this way is still vague. To make our users as concrete as possible, we created four profiles that tried to represent the diversity of the audience.

For each of the four profiles we generated scenarios that included the user’s whole travel experience, from the decision to take a trip, to getting home and checking your frequent flyer statement. Because our goal was to simplify the entire travel experience, it made sense to take this holistic view. We highlighted triggers and stresses as possible areas that a Web site could support the user.

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