Designing an Online Group Trip Booking Service: Enhancing User Engagement and Enjoyment

Sammanfattning

Today most bookings regarding travel are made through an online service. Traveling should be something fun, but many shy away from the booking process. This study focuses on how an online trip booking system for the mountain lodge Tunet could be designed to enhance user engagement, enjoyment, and motivation, and how this affects the perceived usability. Although atmospherics and user experience of digital systems are widely studied, the relationship between online booking services, gamification, and motivation theories has received little attention. The work was divided into four different phases according to the Double Diamond method. During the first phase, discover, a literature study was conducted to gain deeper knowledge about gamification and human motivational theories. The second phase, define, focused on specifying the objective of the study along with further investigation of the topics gamification, flow, SDT, testing methods, and what the booking system for Tunet should contain. The third phase, develop, consisted of turning the gathered information into ideas for functions a booking system could contain, along with developing and testing the first Lo-Fi prototypes. During the last phase, deliver, the results from the Lo-Fi tests were used to develop and test a final Hi-Fi prototype. The results of the study showed that an important base condition for achieving enjoyment in the user is that they understand the functions of the application under use. When designing something that differs from the user’s previous experience, this is a challenge. It was also shown that the type of functions that sufficiently induce enjoyment in the context of a booking service is based on intrinsic motivation. The functions tested in this study that were perceived as most enjoyable were the ability to drag and drop to build the trip, to visualize the trip as a schedule, and the ability to read short stories about different activities. It could be concluded that the final Hi-Fi prototype, with some adjustments, would work well as a booking system for Tunet regarding the enjoyment and motivation of the user. Further studies could investigate how to additionally enhance enjoyment by incorporating functions regarding social aspects.