The Persona

Update!

I’m excited to share the development of primary user persona! This persona is crucial, as it will guide the design of Explainable AI (XAI) strategies for travel planning in my project.

User Interview insights

My research began with in-depth interviews with leisure travellers, revealing how people plan trips. Participants combine traditional methods like discussing plans with friends, using Google for landmarks, and booking through Skyscanner or Airbnb. While many appreciate Generative AI (Gen-AI) tools like ChatGPT for quick research and time-saving, a consistent and significant finding was negative experiences with AI. These included accuracy and reliability issues, outdated information, illogical directions, and even "hallucinating" fictional details. This has led to widespread distrust in AI's output, prompting users to double-check information. Consequently, a clear majority desired to know why AI made specific suggestions, seeking reasoning, transparency (e.g., regarding sponsorship), and validation. They also preferred concise text (bullet points) and visual formats for explanations.

User Persona

This brings us to Liam, user persona. As a software engineer in his early 30s, Liam is a savvy leisure traveller who values planning personalised trips. Despite his technical background, his own experiences reflect those of our interviewees: he appreciates AI's convenience but has been frustrated by its inaccuracies. This fuels his strong desire for transparent XAI, he wants clear reasoning behind AI suggestions to make confident decisions and to understand potential biases, directly informing my project's focus. Liam now embodies the user needs we aim to address, and he will be central to our prototype design and usability testing phases.

Stay tuned for more progress!