Case Study | Travel App

Book an awesome holiday plan for a travel enthusiast

Project Type: Individual

Time Frame: 8 weeks

Tools: Sketch, Invision, Illustrator, Photoshop

Design Process: User research, competitive analyses, user flow, sketch and wireframes, visual mock-ups, prototypes

Overview

The concept for this app revolved around the development of the experience for a travel booking application specifically focused on the manage their itinerary.

Initial Brainstorming

Problem Statement

1. It’s hard to balance among the days available for travelling, acceptable expense and popular destination, and the decision is difficult and time consuming to make.
2. Even for a frequent traveller, it’s difficult to come up with someplace never been yet exciting enough for the upcoming vacation. Or once the destination city or country is decided, we still need some guidance in choosing between points of interest to visit.
3. After the itinerary is finalised, it’s a caretaking task to finish the final booking of the trip across multiple platforms/providers. We’d better make sure our transportations and the accommodations connect. However, the transportation can be flight, train, car service or boat services, the accommodations can be different hotels or Airbnb in different cities.
4. During traveling, it’s impossible to always remember what time is the next transportation, what’s the address of the next destination, we all need to check back to our itinerary every now and then. But internet access is not guaranteed when travelling, printouts are too much to carry and hard to manage.

Research

Quantitative & Qualitative Research Data

Surveys

I conducted an online survey using Google Forms and distributed this via social media. The reason I decided to do a quantitative survey was to gain a better understanding of people’s travel habits, with the key question being how involved people are with the planning process and what portion plays an active role.

I received 44 responses with the majority of participants being female and between the ages of 26 to 35. This survey ruled out participants who had not ever been part of a trip planned by themselves or someone in their group for leisure and overnight or more.

The survey questions were first grouped together then key findings were identified.

Interviews

I conducted 7 user interviews follows the contextual inquiries, to study their trip planning process and what application or tools they use for trip planning. I asked questions such as how they chose their travel destinations, their biggest obstacle to plan a trip, and their biggest concerns when travel, then used an affinity diagram to extract insights from the interview data.

User interview key insights

1. Editing is easier than starting from scratch
2. Always have bookings information easy to be found.
3. Images are stronger than words.
4. Personalized trip plans make a better travel experience.

Personas

I developed two personas based on the user research findings–Blogger Swapnil and HR Manoj Kumar.

Manoj and Swapnil Persona

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis

Empathy Mapping

Using the same research data, I sorted the data on the empathy map. From the empathy map, I was able to obtain further insights, identify pain points, and derive my persona.

Work Flow

Prototype

Wireframing

Designs

Onboarding Process

Login, Signup and Listing pages

Trip Planing

Flight Booking

Add-ons

1. Add dialogue and collaboration features to allow multi-user trip planning.
2. Add album feature to store photos taken at this destination with itineraries.
3. Auto-generate travel blog out of the trip plans. Everyone can be a travel blogger!
4. Add reward points to encourage people public their itineraries.