A 1-stop itinerary planner that allows a fuss-free experience of planning trips

Duration: Oct — Dec 2017 (3 months) | Platform: Mobile

Travellers mobile prototype: https://invis.io/57PY7GLVRTK

— — —

This project was particularly memorable as it was my first ‘proper’ exposure to the field of UI / UX via a mentorship program by CoLLab.

My team-mate, Lewis and I, work extremely well together due to our complementary strengths; I come with design and user research skills, while his coding background ensures the feasibility of our product. Not forgetting our mentor who is a product manager from TradeGecko, who gave us valuable advice along each step. Lewis and I were both involved in conducting user research, analysing the insights and agreeing on the direction and features of Travellers. I went on to design all the screens on Sketch and put it into a prototype on InVision.

Challenge:

Identify a real-world problem and tackle it.

1) Identify a problem

Lewis and I started by listing all the problems we could find around us (as shown by GIF below). After weighing factors such as problem significance, feasibility, and both our time commitments, we betted on issues we wanted to solve via fake credits and eventually settled on an itinerary problem in the travel industry.

How we arrive at this problem: Having been on exchange, we realised that most of our friends and our common pain point revolved around planning for the trip. Many travel apps simply did not satisfy our travel needs, as we eventually have to piece all the information ourselves.

We went to do a quick search on travel trends online to confirm our findings, and the results showed a massive opportunity in online trip planning.

1. Travellers are increasingly searching and booking their travel online. In fact, 31% of leisure travellers and 53% of business travellers did their booking on a smartphone. (Think with Google, 2016)
2. 46% of travellers make their decisions on mobile but then book on another device. (Think with Google, 2016)
3. Consumers visit an average of 38 sites before booking a trip (Expedia, 2015)

2) Interview Respondents

First, we designed our questionnaires to understand users’ motivations for planning trips, such as if users like to plan trips, what resources they use to plan, any problems they faced during planning and the actual trip

Next, we interviewed 10 respondents (friends and colleagues who recently went for a trip) face-to-face.

After which, we consolidated our findings into several insights.

Common pain points:

1. Lack of time
2. Too much travel information everywhere
3. Lack of small yet critical details (logistics, direction, safety etc)

Common behaviour:

1. Most enjoy the process of planning itineraries.
2. Most prefer to rely on blogs (not paid websites) to search for activities as it feels more personal, but more often than not, these activities do not cater to their preferences. They then plot the destination on Google Map.
3. Surprisingly, none of the respondents has used any trip planning tools.
4. Some travel to take a break from their hectic schedule, some enjoy travelling thoroughly, and some view travelling as a bonding session.
5. Pre-planning is not the only problem faced; problems arising during the trip can also affect their travel experience.

Hence, how can we opporunities we can consider

1. Ensure our app is

3) Building Personas

Our target audience is working adults, who enjoy travelling . planning

Persona #1: Katie

Persona #2: Dave

4) Jobs-to-be-done framework

Going beyond demographics and seeking to understand users’ motivations can give us a deeper understanding of their behavior.

5) Unique Selling Proposition of Travellers

Travellers is the ONLY online itinerary planner that auto-generates itineraries personalised to your needs.

Purpose: To allow a fuss-free experience of planning trips

Top 3 features

1. Search, select and save places of interest
2. Auto-generate your own personalised itinerary using an algorithm
3. Build a travel community where members create and share itineraries, exchange tips and just interact with each other

Why Travellers and not other competitors?

We recognise that our competitors include traditional travel agents, Google Trips and other online travel planners (e.g. GoJourny)

1. Majority of the respondents enjoy the process of planning itineraries.
2. Gives you full control over the activities you want to see or do
3. A compelling social element where travellers can easily socialise and share their experiences, building its own travel community

There are so many features Lewis and I came out with to eventually, monetise Travellers. However, we agree to do 1 step at a time, to focus on the purpose of Travellers which is convenience.

Learning point to note: Unfortunately, we did not probe our respondents why they did not use any trip planning tools, which could have further helped us in knowing the features they appreciate or dislike.

We have chosen mobile to be our first medium as travellers are increasingly searching and booking their travel online as mentioned above, and people worldwide are significantly spending more time on mobile than on desktop. Also, we believe in a mobile-first strategy, to focus only on the main features in the app before scaling it to the desktop.

6) Task Flow

This is how we envision Travellers to work for our first phase. We definitely have more features to add that revolves around monetisation, but that is for future plans.

Click on the link to see how Travellers come to life on a mobile app!

https://invis.io/57PY7GLVRTK

How Travellers work?

7) Tackling Pain Points 1 & 2

Proposed solutions

a) Customise to users’ travel motivations and needs at the start

b) Top 3 itineraries pinned in the ‘explore’ page to reduce time searching

c) Auto-generate itineraries and flexible shifting of activities

8) Tackling Pain Point 3

Proposed Features

a) Customise to users’ travel motivations and needs at the start

b) Include specific details

c) Flexible shifting of activities to account for eg. waking up timing

9) What have I learned from this project?

As it was my first ‘proper’ exposure to UI/UX, I really gained a lot of new knowledge

• Learning an entirely new set of thinking frameworks (i.e. jobs-to-be-done, validation board, lean model canvas)
• Hands-on using software to design prototype (i.e. Sketch & InVision)

I am very thankful that my mentor was quite strict with Lewis and I, giving us tight deadlines and recommending us many books to ensure we are on track and well-read.

I was initially worried that I could not handle well as I have the misconception that it will be very technical and involves coding. But in reality, it is really about problem-solving, to understand users’ pain points and design solutions to meet their needs, and this is what I have been keen on and practicing.

As we were given a short period to complete the project, we did not conduct proper user testing of Travellers as well as the validation board. I hope to be involved in the entire process in the future.

10) Lessons learnt for future case studies

• Ask more ‘whys’
• Be more diligent in coming out with hypothesis and testing them. After I started documenting this project then I realise there are several assumptions yet to be tested.
• Be more aware of UI principles — the amount of spacing between functions are not user-friendly itself
• Incorporate animation to make Travellers seem more engaging and dynamic