Brief: Create a travel itinerary app for millennial age travelers. The app should not include booking. Make the app useful for both group and personal travel.

Problem: My mom used to always say that you never really know someone until you’ve traveled with them. Everyone travels differently, making finding an itinerary platform that can work for several different people pretty difficult. What can make this process even harder is trying to manage and coordinate the traveling wants of several different people with in one traveling group, therefore finding an itinerary that keep everyone happy and organized can prove to be very difficult.

Our problem was to build an app that would address these issues in a group or single traveler setting.

Goals:

1. Build an app that will appeal to every kind of traveler.
2. Create a user experience that will help users have a more memorable trip.
3. Develop empathy for our users through better understanding their traveling habits, goals, and pain points.

Our Process:

My Role: I worked with a team of four other designers. My role was to assist the team in research by sending out a survey, conducting users interviews, and analyzing our raw data. I also worked on our wireframes, user testing, and led our high fidelity mock ups.

Empathize

Assumptions: We decided to first tackle our problem by challenging our assumptions. Everyone on my team was the age of our target audience and enjoyed traveling. We wanted to make sure we remained objective so we listed out our assumptions and anti-assumptions.

Most people travel in groups | Some people might enjoy exploring alone

Most people travel with a specific plan in mind | With information at our finger tips, people usually just plan on the go

The usefulness of an itinerary really depends on the location of the trip| Users will use an itinerary no matter where they are traveling

Survey: Next we sent out a survey to better understand what users wanted and why users wanted those specific things. Each questions we asked had a specific purpose:

User interviews: After understanding that a large part of the users who took our survey traveled very often, my team conducted over 8 user interviews with people who traveled on a regular basis.

Define

Heres what we found:

• Millennial travelers do not use itineraries.
• In order for users to start using an itinerary app there would have to be some sort of extra value added to the experience.
• Users travel for pleasure more than anything else.
• At a ratio of 70% to 30% the majority of our users like a flexible travel schedule.
• Social media effects the way users plan their trips

These findings effected our app in two major ways:

1. Our app had to have some added value outside of just an itinerary. There needed to be one other major feature that drew users to us because an itinerary was simply just not enough.

2. We needed to have some sort of social feature included in our app (messaging, up and down votes, sharing plans, ect…)

Persona: After analyzing all of our research we built our persona. Meet Becca Waters. Creating Becca helped us better understand who we were building for and focus on the needs of our users.

Ideate

User Journey Map : We decided to then do a user journey map. We wanted to be able to understand our users frustrations at every point in their journey.

This exercise really helped me better understand our problem because it helped me understand our value at each phase in the process. It was the perfect way to understand both the user and business needs.

Narrowing the scope: It was important to stick to the user goals at this point in our process. Our user needed to be able to…

From here we got together as a team to sketch out the skeleton of what we wanted our app to look and function like.

This turned out to be one of the most important parts of our ideation process because my team really got a lot of ideas out. We were able to get all of our ideas out on the table and start narrowing down from there what ideas to prioritize because they spoke most to our MVP, and to our research.

Design Reviews: Every week we were able to present to a group of designer to get their feedback on our app. We quickly found that a main part of our app had some serious design flaws. Our team was really challenged at this point to think outside the box. We had to put a lot of trust in the validity of our process and put our teams timeline on the back burner.

Prototype and Test

Wire Frames and User Testing: At the begging of our project we set a timeline of benchmarks we wanted to check off, because of our major design flaws we had to severely alter our process and focus on taking the time to run through every idea we had. Each idea went through a life of visualization, wire framing, and user testing in order to find the best one.

Amongst other changes, here are some that were made…

Round 1:

Round 2:

Round 3:

We quickly found that our strength was going to be in our process and that pushed our focus away from the visual design for a while. This was a tough design decision to make for my team, but we felt in the end, and within the time constraints our team had, it would ultimately create a better product to benefit both us and the user.

Key insights:

1. The concept of our original drag and drop idea, that both our team, and our users seemed to love in the beginning, did not hold up in user testing. Users found it confusing and hard to use. We went through roughly seven designs of one feature, which took time, but in the end strengthened our project. It is okay to adjust your strategy when needed.
2. We were unable to satisfy every user. Here is where sticking to our MVP became vital. We had to remember that we created Becca with the specific intention of designer FOR HER. Any effort to create a more broad interface needed to be saved for future versions of our app.
3. Users told us they did not want a messaging aspect of the app, because all messaging and planning of trips was done through text messages. So we took messages out. We then realized a major function of our app was not working, we re-introduced messages in a different way by calling it “activity”. Users were thrilled about this change, and could see themselves using the messaging function more often. Sometimes what users tell you they want is not what they actually NEED, you have to read between the lines of user behavior.

High Fidelity:

Branding: It was important for our app to be exciting to users. We chose colors that were bright and exciting but clean. From the beginning our users told us that our app to be very visual in order to capture their attention.

Preference test: We started to diverge into several different designs as we moved forward and felt stuck with which design spoke most to our users. We needed to converge to one design so we took to our users for help and conducted a preference test…

In the end, here is what we came up with based on our user preferences…

Welcome to Tripping!

A travel app that allows you to add certain items to a trip board, creating a simple “bullet list” format itinerary of all of the things on your bucket list. Tripping allows travelers to travel in a way that suits them best by browsing for trip ideas, saving maps, and even sharing with other in your travel group.

We created Tripping to help any kind of traveler improve their traveling experience. Users are able to not only look up recommendations, share actives restaurants, and places to go, but also organize these into “trip boards” that help them keep track of what they wanted to do when. We found a way to satisfy the most opposite of travelers in one place. It is the perfect new age spin on a traveling app because it goes with the flow of YOUR trip and adds an added measure of value to your experience through recommendations and social interaction when planning and going on trips.

Reflection

Further thinking: As I continued to think about this project, there are a few things I would love to explore adding in future iterations.

Build out the social aspect more. We wanted to create a way for users to share their trips so other people could see where they went and what their favorite spots were. This could be done through some sort of profile, where you could follow people and see the trips they had been on/published.

Work towards perfecting our visual design more. Although I led our visual design, the final product was something we all chose and agreed on. There are a couple things I would love to edit about the design to make it more suitable for our users.

Conclusion

This project pushed me to stretch my skills and have faith in the UX process. Visual design is something I am really passionate about, I believe it has the power to influence and excite users, but our project challenge me to think differently. I had to become a team player and sacrifice parts of the visual design that I really wanted to spend more time on in order to perfect our features and layout.

I think we all thrived off of user testing every single part of our app. We ran roughly 10 rounds of user testing in order to make sure everything had a purpose and place on our interface. Nothing was there that did not need to be.

I am grateful for the opportunity I had to be on a diverse team that stuck to their guns about what they felt was most important. I felt challenged to let go of the things I loved about the app, yet empowered when I stuck to my guns about certain design decisions that our users later validated.

I feel confident in the design process we chose, and feel excited moving forward knowing that any problem can be solved if you trust in your process and listen to your users.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed learning about my process as much as I enjoyed doing it.