Tripping, Itinerary planner — UX case study

“Keeps travel a little more organized”

Overview

Travel is a growing industry and has seen significant growth since 2010. Millennial’s specifically book their travel plans with mobile devices. Some users make travel plans all through text messaging and on impulse in and unstructured process.

The Challenge

The main goal of this challenge was to make an app specifically for millennials. A sub-goal that our team gave ourselves was we wanted this app to be accessible for both personal and group travel.

Research

We sent out a short survey and held user interviews to capture the needs of our users. Some of the information we got was surprising. We wanted to know what percentage of people traveled in groups with others (that they did not live with), how many people used itineraries to plan their trip, how flexible those itineraries were, and if their previous trips influenced current (or future) trips

• 91% of people travel with someone they don’t live with.

• 54% of people use travel itineraries

• 69% of people are open to a flexible itinerary

• 71% of previous trips influence current or future trips

Persona

Once we got a premise from what our users needed/wanted, We started to construct our user persona.

After we made our persona we went forward with creating our user story map and user story flow. Throughout creating the map and flows we collaborated heavily with each other on trying to get it just right.

Wireframes

This part of the process is the part where we learned later on that we probably should have split up and sketched out our own ideas.

Once we got our map and flows finished, we jumped right into wireframing as a team. We started throwing out ideas on a whiteboard but talking through if they were usable ideas or not so good ideas.

We came up with this “drag and drop” feature where you would drag each activity that you wanted into certain days. We liked it and decided to take this concept into low fidelity and try user testing it.

The user testing on this was pretty eye-opening. We thought it made perfect sense but once we started getting it into users’ hands, None of it made sense. It wasn’t intuitive. On the drag and drop screen, no one could see that as what we intended. We had a hard time moving away from the drag and drop feature so we tried to redesign and test again. Still had the same result of just absolute confusion.

Eventually, we came to our senses and slightly tweaked the idea. The source of most of the confusion was we didn’t know how to portray it within our wireframes. Every user test we did, they would get to the page where would start organizing a trip and always say the same thing “Okay, what now” or “What am I looking at?”.

Moving away from the drag and drop idea seemed to be successful. We decided to go with more of a “pick a day, add items” approach. So now with this idea, we started to test again.

After testing this flow, it seemed that it was on its way to where we wanted it to be. This is where each of us split up with our final wireframes and put our own flair on it. Once we finished up with our styles, we as a group couldn’t decide on one style. We ended up doing a preference test with our peers to see which one they liked as a whole or what pieces of each one they liked.

This was an extremely fun project to work on. Very challenging at times but I believe our final product is strong.