Traso- An app Travel Partner Finder-UX Case Study

9 min readNov 10, 2023

Making your experience more than worthwhile!

Project Overview

Traveling is a natural human instinct. We’re always ready for fun and adventure, but convincing friends or family to join us can be tiresome and frustrating. That’s where Traso comes in.
Traso is a platform that helps you find your perfect travel partner. Whether you’re looking for a friend to explore new places with, a companion for a solo trip, or someone to share the costs with, Traso can help you connect with the right person.

The Problem

Travel is a natural human instinct. We are always up for fun and adventure, but convincing friends or family to join us can be tiring and frustrating. Millions of people are passionate about travel, but finding a travel companion who shares their interests and budget can be difficult. Existing travel websites and apps are not well designed to help people find compatible travel partners, leading to missed opportunities for exploration and adventure.

Solution

Solves the problem of finding compatible travel companions. To match various factors including users’ travel preferences, personality type and budget. It helps users find travel companions that suit them, their travel style and their budget, find their perfect travel match

Target Audience

The target audience was provided in the problem brief. The primary targeted audience consists of three main groups. These categories are: 18 to 24 year old, 25 to 34 and 35 to 60years old.

Design Thinking Process

I followed the design thinking process to design a solution for this problem.

01.Empathize

To design the best solution, I needed to empathize with the users. Through secondary and primary research, I gained a deep understanding of their needs and pain points.

Secondary Research

A study conducted by Hostel world found that 42% of travellers had difficulty finding compatible travel companions online. Another survey by Travel Pulse found that 38% of travellers have had negative experiences with travel companions they met online. Style, unreliable and irresponsible behaviour, poor communication and conflict resolution skills, convincing family and friends to go on a trip. A Pew Research Centre study found that 57% of adults say they have difficulty getting family and friends to travel with them. Common reasons for difficulty convincing family and friends to travel include different travel interests and budgets, lack of work or school hours, fear of flying or other travel-related anxiety, unwillingness to spend money on travel, and complications during travel.

In a survey conducted by TripAdvisor, the top three problems travellers face are lost luggage (28%), flight delays or cancellations (25%), food poisoning (23), and other common problems travellers face include language barriers, culture shock, overpacking, and fraud.

Research shows that many people face challenges before and after a trip. Finding compatible travel companions online can be difficult, and convincing family and friends to travel can be even more challenging. Travelers face many problems during travel like lost luggage, flight delay, food poisoning

Goals

Planning the trip
People can able to easily find our travel partner
They are in same mind interest

Insights

People are always ready for a trip. It’s a natural human tendency that we are ready for fun 24 X 7. travelling makes people better it helps to people health benefits and reducing human stress and etc. while travelling with partner using online planform having many problems.

Primary Research

With the secondary research insights in hand, it was now time to validate them by obtaining first hand information from the actual users themselves. So I conducted user interviews to learn more about the different experiences people have had in travel.
Planning for the interviews, I first created a questionnaire that was based around the actual context of the problem. I recruited around 5 participants aging from 20–50 for the interview.

why do u love travelling?
How often do you travel?
What are your favourite destinations?
At what time do you cancel plans?
What are your biggest challenges when traveling?
What are the most important factors to you when planning a trip?
What are your thoughts on travel apps and websites?
What are your thoughts on finding travel partner in online?
What features would you like to see in a travel app?

Key Insights

Pain points

Tiring to convince people for the trip
Unhappy when people don’t agrees with you
Conflicts while taking small decisions
Tiring to convince people for the trip Busy Schedule of friends and family Conflicts while planning Annoyed with cancel of plans Solo travelling is boring to me Budget issue

Gain Points

Loves travelling Always excited for a trip Loves to interact with new people
Strangers can be trustworthy as well Somehow convinced my friends for pool party That guy took us to the places that we were not aware of and it was fun

02.Define

In the first phase, I empathized with the users. Now based on my research insights, I have to establish a clear idea of exactly which problems to solve for my users

Affinity Mapping

After the interview, I gathered all the users statements and then sorted them into groups, based on their natural relationships. I divided the data into 5 categories : Says, Does, Thinks, Feels, Pain points. This helped in uncovering the major common pain points of the users and prioritizing them.

User Persona

03.Ideate

Inorder to ideate the possible solutions, I first wanted to find where exactly the users face the hurdles in their journey. So in this phase, I mapped out the current state experience of the user and started creating the flows for the app that fills the gap of the current experience

Task Flow

With the understanding of how the user’s journey was using the experience map, I created user flows for the app that will fill the gaps in the physical journey of the end user.

Register and Login

User must register themselves. Make login and registration forms as simple and straightforward as possible. Allow users to recover their passwords if they forget them.

Find Partner

Once the user is logged into the application, if the user is interested in Finding travel partner, the user can easily post the plan and will check the user plan with other user plan, if it’s same, check the listed users profile find the same interest person, if not same the plan will be posted into publicly visible to all users it will help to find travel partner. if there are any questions to contact the support team, they will get an easy solution and quickly find the travel partner and satisfy the customer.

Ask suggestion

Once the user logs in to the app, if the user is interested in exploring a particular location, the user can easily post the quarries with the location, date of travel and description of that trip. They will inform you in advance and location related information like nearby places.

User Flow

A user flow is a comprehensive visual representation of all the essential steps a user must take within a journey to achieve a specific goal. It depicts the complete path a user would follow to successfully complete a task or reach their desired objective, providing a clear and detailed understanding of the process.

Site Map

A sitemap is a visual representation of a website’s content that helps users understand the organization and structure of the site. It provides a clear overview of all the pages on the site and how they are connected, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. Sitemaps can be in the form of text or images, but image-based sitemaps are often more intuitive and easier to understand.

04.Design

In this fourth phase of the design thinking process, I started creating low fidelity wireframes. After many iterations, I finalized one version and converted them to high fidelity wireframes. I also prototyped them so that it can be tested out with the users in the testing phase.

Low fidelity wireframes

I created many versions before getting to the final wireframes. My earlier wireframes did not match the requirements, so I recreated the layout of the screen on the basis of the user flows.

High fidelity Wireframes

After finalizing the low fidelity wireframes, I added details to the exisiting wireframes by putting the content information and upgrading the components.

Style Guide — Colour & Typography

To create a colour palette that’ll evoke a open spaces, freedom, imagination, expansiveness and inspiration in the users while they use the app, I made a mood board which consisted of images of travel, sky, nature etc…, The colours that were extracted from it were mostly Blue. The final chosen colour palette also passed the contrast checker with a very high ratio.

Considering the possible use cases where the app will mostly be used, the typeface had to be highly readable and should also reflect the user need. After exploring lots of typefaces, the geometric sans-serif typeface ‘Poppins’ was chosen because of its legibility and distinct letter forms.
The text in the app had to be readable for all of the target audience which ranged from ages 18–55. With careful considerations of accessibility, the body text size was set to 16pts.

Heading 1 — Bold, 24 pts
Heading 2 — Semi bold, 20 pts
Body 1 — Medium 16 pts
Body 2 — Regular, 14pts
Sub headings — Light, 12pts

Final UI

Applying the style guide to my final high-fidelity wireframes, I started creating the UI mockups.

05.Test

It was time to test the live prototype with potential users and check how the users respond to it. Based on the testing insights, I will decide if the designs needs to be altered or not.

Moderated Usability Testing

Usability testing is a vital component of the user experience design process, allowing for the evaluation of a product’s ease of use and efficiency through real user involvement.

After finalizing the screens, I proceeded to conduct usability testing with five participants representative of my target audience. The focus was to gauge how users perceive the app’s main features.

To structure the testing, I devised specific tasks and developed a questionnaire to guide the testing session. Some of the scenarios presented to the participants were…

Scenario

Alex is a solo traveler who is planning a trip to Japan. He has always wanted to visit the country, but he is hesitant to travel alone. He decides to use a travel partner matching app to find someone who shares his interests and budget. He creates a profile and lists his desired travel dates and destinations. He also includes information about his interests, such as Japanese culture, food, and history.

Prototype

Learnings & Takeaway

While working on this project, I realized how important it is to empathize with users and clearly understand their needs before designing solutions. The main issue for most was finding travel partners with similar interests and style and learning and taking away was enlightening. I realized that if we could solve this problem, it would solve many other problems. Because they travel with people who share their interests. As I started brainstorming, other additional features came up, but I had to focus on the core set of features first. I’ve prioritized features that make it easy for users to find travel partners who share their interests and style. This project was an interesting challenge for me because I had to work with time constraints. I prioritize features and make sure I build the most important features first.