Nicole Fermie
Jul 27, 2017 · 34 min read

Using UX strategy to help improve usability and community engagement on a travel planning website called Tripidee. Our solutions aimed to burgeon Tripidee’s primary value in providing users with a visual trip planning tool to make it the best of it’s kind and set it apart from the myriad travel-related websites that flood the web.

Role: UX Researcher, Interaction Designer, Information Architect

Timeframe: 3 weeks

Project Type: Client

Client: Tripidee

Deliverables: Domain Research, Competitive Analysis, Personas, Customer Journey Mapping, Client Journey Mapping, Task Analysis, Sketch and InVision Prototypes, App Map, Annotated Wireframes for Developers, UI and UX designers, Future Considerations, UI Content Strategy.

The brief

Tripidee is a travel planning website that markets itself as a visual trip planner. It differs from most others in that it doesn’t prioritise getting users to their destination, or helping them find accommodation, as much as it does helping users plan out what to do once they get there. It operates under the tagline: “Dream up, plan out, and share your perfect trip”.

We were approached to help improve the site’s general usability and to uncover its current value proposition as articulated by the users themselves. Our team was also asked to focus our research efforts on the travel itinerary section of the site and to explore other ways of keeping users engaged with Tripidee. Lastly, we were tasked with finding ways of engaging the Tripidee community to interact with each other in order to make the site more self-sufficient and community-run.

This particular project set itself up to be a fairly straightforward three week UX sprint, but the ever–unpredictable and challenging insights from users made this project a delightful learning curve and a great start–up company case study to add to my portfolio.

Rising to the Challenge

Prior to speaking to any users or committing any insights to stickies we knew that this project required us to understand the mental models of travel planning:

What are the building blocks of planning and how do users prioritise them?

Our users expressed the variation and complexity of travel planning in myriad ways:

“I see trip planning as an art form.” Ali, Professional Trip Planner, 29

Others expressed how time, scheduling and an ability to prioritise their activities were their building blocks of travel:

“I don’t have to finish everything on my schedule, but I don’t want to miss out on anything. “ Val, Growth Consultant, 56

On the other end of the spectrum we heard many users prioritise price, convenience and spontaneity when planning trips:

“I love weekend trips like, very European, I love looking for a cheap flight like two weeks before and then — just go!!” Romain, Interaction Designer, 22

The Solution

Based on our research, we determined three primary mental models of planning that varied depending on the type of user. We weaved these insights into our final solution that comprised:

Our final prototype communicated the value of UX research to our clients, particularly with something so acutely subjective as travel planning. We presented them with a variety of different solutions that addressed usability problems, changes to information hierarchy and at times even UI changes such as incorporating more white space throughout in an attempt to reduce the cognitive load experienced by users in our usability tests.

Of course there’s more — but before you commit…

If you would like to know more about this project then please do get in touch so that I can talk you through it over my favourite beverage: coffee. However, if you feel up to the challenge of reading about this particular piece in all its detailed glory then indulge that desire and scroll down for the full write-up.



As with all new projects, our first step was to get on the site ourselves and use it to the full. We created several trips using Tripidee which we then attempted to share with others and collaborate on. We even printed out itineraries to see how these would translate on paper. We knew that our initial meeting with our clients was going to be pivotal in truly understanding our stakeholders and their needs, so we conducted a preliminary, high level exploration of Tripidee’s competitive market in preparation. This initial market inquiry sensitised us to the world of travel planning and the various online tools that were currently available to users. Competitors we looked into included well-established travel planners such as Travefy, Triphobo and Tripit:

Entering the meeting with a better understanding of the domain and competitors allowed us to ask more specific questions. We wanted to understand exactly what our client was hoping to improve using UX strategy.

Tripidee is a startup based in Kauai, Hawaii, which meant that we had a 6 hour time difference on top of all the constraints of meeting remotely. My communication skills received a huge boost as a consequence, as we needed go to great lengths to ensure that all design decisions were communicated clearly while still being visually engaging, as we couldn’t rely on the gestures and rapport of physical settings.

We used our kick-off meeting to empathise more strongly with our client, learn their assumptions about their user base, and gather their thoughts on their product’s value to existing and prospective users. We collected our client’s assumptions and divided them up into two distinct groups ahead of creating our research objectives. The first related to the assumptions made on a user’s mental models surrounding travel planning (behavioral assumptions) and the second related to the site’s usability and the way our client assumed their site was currently being used (system assumptions).

We also made note of our client’s assumption that their primary target audience would be between 25–40 years of age with short holiday timeframes.

Our client wasn’t the only one with inherent assumptions. As designers, we started to develop our own assumptions even after our preliminary exploration of the site and initial competitive analysis. We decided to collate these as well as by adding that:

  • Users wanted this product more as a place to collect all of their holiday ideas rather than as an itinerary planner
  • Users would find the website too confusing
  • Users would have hugely varied opinions of Tripidee’s value
  • Trip planning would predominantly be web-based as opposed to being conducted on a mobile phone or tablet.

We set about creating a list of research objectives based on the assumptions from our kick-off meeting. Since travel is hugely subjective, we also wanted to gather information on how users plan trips outside of digital platforms, to understand how we could tailor Tripidee’s service to better suit patterns of behaviour and travel planning habits.

The primary objectives that our research sought to explore:

With our research objectives in hand, we set about developing transcripts and task lists that allowed us to observe the existing website in full use. Our interviews were split into two distinct sections to accommodate for our behavioral and system–related questions. The first half of the interview sought to gauge a user’s travel habits and planning procedures prior to travel, as well as how both return and first-time users perceived Tripidee’s value proposition at first glance, and then again after having some time to explore it more thoroughly.

The second half was a usability test with set tasks that allowed the user to access all pages and pop-ups within the site. These tasks allowed us to observe the site’s functionality and determine whether the prioritisation of features and information corresponded with the way in which users plan trips. It was going to be a lot to cover in the precious hour that we had with users. In some instances we definitely struggled with the time constraint, because if there’s one thing travellers like talking about — it’s their trips!

We were able to test with 3 subject matter experts, 2 return users and 3 new users. Our subject matter experts within this project were all semi-professional travel planners who used the site as a tool for curating trips for their clients.

The results we gathered from our interviews confirmed the personal and subjective nature of travel. We found that users traveled very differently and prioritized very specific details when attempting to enhance their travel experience. Some users took a holistic, curative approach to travel planning, such as Ali, who went so far as claiming how:

“I see trip planning as an art form.” Ali, Professional Trip Planner, 29

Others expressed how time, scheduling and an ability to prioritise their activities were their building blocks of travel:

“I don’t have to finish everything on my schedule, but I don’t want to miss out on anything. “ Val, Growth Consultant, 56

On the other end of the spectrum we heard many users prioritise price, convenience and spontaneity when planning trips:

“I love weekend trips like, very European, I love looking for a cheap flight like two weeks before and then — just go!!” Romain, Interaction Designer, 22

We found that some users struggled to find a common place to store their pre-travel ideas. Conversations about collating ideas uncovered a lot of interesting insights about our user’s travel habits and the tools they used prior to Tripidee (or without Tripidee for new users). Val, a return user, expressed how:

“I’ll open a document and just save links, sometimes I will get together a spreadsheet. There is a lot to organise, I always have some place where I capture the information. But it always felt inadequate.” Val, Growth Consultant, 56

We found evidence across our interviews of users being overwhelmed by the amount of content online, and as a consequence, choosing not to plan. Some even turn to travel planners such as Ali who said:

“There’s so much content online — people want someone to curate for them.” Ali, Professional Travel Planner, 22

Staci, a 41 year old entrepreneur who primarily travels for leisure, claimed how she shied away from planning by exclaiming:

“I go on trips because I don’t want to think.” Staci, Entrepreneur, 41

We wanted participants to articulate their own value propositions of Tripidee in order to gauge how effective their onboarding was for new users. With return users this step allowed us to assess whether the features and content on the site were actually helping and providing value to their travel planning in the ways that our client intended.

The insights gathered further confirmed how intricate and unique travel planning was to the user, their time frame, the purpose of their visit and sometimes even their travel destinations. Users tended to prioritise the ability to collate their travel activities geographically, visually, or temporally. Others expressed that the primary value of the site was in the ability to engage in collaborative travel planning. The users that were most confused were the ones who planned trips by budget. The lack of sales–related CTAs left some budget conscious users searching for flight or accommodation deals, overlooking the site’s planning functions entirely.

Here are some key quotes that convey the wide variety of value propositions we accumulated.

Emphasis on organisation:

“I would describe this as a planning organizer, it organizes it for you with a map and day-by-day aspect.” Arrin, 37

Emphasis on the visual:

“I would say that it’s a trip planning software that allows you to visually plan your trip and drag and drop it into cohesive days.” Ali, 29

“What is exciting about Tripidee, is because it is a visual based planning tool, and it has some flexibility to it, the customer can be involved in it. Ultimately if the two of you could be on a screen, then you can come up with the perfect trip.” Fergie, 64

An example of a user who was left wholly confused was Staci, who laid bare the fact that some new users who arrive at the site without prior knowledge of it’s functionality are often left looking for recognisable building blocks that were absent from Tripidee, such as hotels, flights, reviews and ratings.

“From what I see it’s something similar to like Orbitz, Tripadvisor, Expedia, it allows you to have a profile page to sign up.” Staci, 41

Others emphasised the importance of geography being part of Tripidee’s value proposition:

“Think the website is just like Tripcase and Tripit. Seems more intuitive — the map feature is big — better than what other competitors can offer.” Michael, 26

Where’s others placed Tripidee’s facility for online planning collaboration at the heart of it’s value proposition:

“Collaborate — give that more emphasis in how it works — that you can plan and share ideas with other people. The collaborative part is another thing that is kinda unique to them.” Lauren, 37

“One thing that isn’t really prominent but I thought was kind of one of the big goals on Tripidee…the planning with friends. Looks more like a Pinterest thing” Matt, 40

The variation within our user base was becoming palpable by the time we reached the end of our first sprint. Affinity mapping was essential in order to find trends between so many distinct users. We made a design decision to create three personas in order to capture the variety of mental models surrounding travel planning and to ensure that all future designs would genuinely take them into consideration.

We created the following user types or personas in order to capture the all the various insights and mental models that we gathered in our initial interviews:

  1. Chloe, 38 — The Meticulous Planner
  2. Ryan, 26 — The Wanderlust Traveler
  3. Rachel, 30 — The Package Traveler

The Meticulous Planner:

As the title suggests, this was a composite of users who consider the planning stage part of their travel experience. They prioritise details, not wanting to miss out on a single thing on their meticulously crafted trips. They go beyond the digital realm to find great travel ideas, such as browsing local magazines and brochures to find hidden gems. Their primary frustrations stem from ‘missing out on an opportunity because of poor planning’. Their primary motivation for travel is to further their knowledge of other places and to escape from stress. These planners tend to be 35+ and often have families. They favour structure, detail, and the ability to organise and easily access their travel ideas. Meticulous planners were also the ones who took pride in the trip planning stage and found value in the ability to collaborate on trips with others and provide recommendations. Travel agents that we interviewed fell within this persona type.

The Wanderlust Traveler:

This persona sees getting lost as part of their trip experience. They enjoy off-the-cuff travel and want a digital space within which they can quickly, easily and visually collect their travel ideas and recommendations without having to worry about structuring it temporally or geographically. These travellers favour adventure, spontaneity and have an aversion to all things touristy. Their frustrations are mostly centered around not having one specific place for all their travel notes. They also tend to dislike travelling in groups. Their primary motivation to travel is rooted in a desire to find adventure, further their knowledge and pure impulse.

The Package Traveler:

Our final persona goes on holiday to escape having to think or plan. Holidays for them are a departure from reality. Their motivations to travel are primarily governed by budget. They prioritise flights and accommodation ahead of furthering knowledge or discovering a place. They travel to relax and often choose pre-curated trips and package holidays. This persona was a composite users that tended to find less value in Tripidee due to their mental models primarily consisting of flight and hotel bookings, none of which are currently available to purchase through Tripidee.

From these personas we set about mapping our travellers’ individual journeys more holistically. We used these maps to record, understand and visually represent areas in which Tripidee could extend their offerings and improve common frustrations experienced within our users’ average journeys, as well as where they could improve their existing services. An example of one that we developed for our meticulous traveller can be seen below.

These journeys showed us exactly where we were able to develop concepts to improve a user’s ability to plan their trips more efficiently. Creating these journey maps also helped us identify ways of making Tripidee more valuable to the third persona that our research identified, the package traveller. We still had a bunch of insights to sift through so we once again fell back on affinity diagramming to process the wealth of data and visually highlight the primary sources of frustration experienced across the board.

Certain patterns started to emerge among our test insights. Interviewees across all identified user types struggled with particular aspects of the site and expressed how these often didn’t match their expectations.

A few major sources of confusion included:

Adding a Stop

Adding a stop is arguably one of the most crucial popups on the Tripidee site as it is where users were able to search, find and add their travel ideas to their existing trips. However, users were often confused or disappointed by the lack of functionality and information hierarchy on this crucial popup.

Stop Name

As the name suggests, users were able to input the name of their stop in the hope of Tripidee automatically generating this information through a Google API. However, tests showed that most users abandoned using this search option as the stops found were sometimes not even geographically related to the trip they were planning. Users wanted the system to automatically restrict their search geographically to only look for stops within the country or city that they were in.

This popup also was found to be insufficient when attempting to add more obscure locations, as these were also not auto-populated as users expected, reflecting a disconnect between their expectations and the actual site’s usability. This lack of functionality meant that users would often leave the site to use search engines such as Google for the stops they were looking for, posing a threat to their focus on Tripidee-specific tasks.

Duration and Priority

Adding a stop on Tripidee brings up a variety of input fields, from the stop name through to the levels of priority, duration of time to spend at a particular stop, as well as a place to input the website address, confirmation numbers, budget considerations and even latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.

Our research revealed that users, including the meticulous planner, found some of these fields tedious and in some cases restrictive. As expressed by Romain, a wanderlust traveler:

“I want a way to add a stop without too much admin.” Romain, 22

The ‘duration’ and ‘priority’ fields left users confused and often feeling inflexible as they struggled to ascertain how long they would be spending at a place they’d never been to. Other users also struggled to exit the ‘add a stop’ popup as many appeared to search for a ‘close’ icon, leaving the ‘cancel’ CTA to often be largely overlooked.

Homepage

The homepage — a user’s first impression of Tripidee — was often perceived as too text heavy.

The site’s primary tagline: “Get a sense of place” didn’t adequately convey Tripidee’s value to both its new and return users, and the lack of travel-related imagery also left particularly new, package traveler types confused as to what the website actually does. Tripidee was also found to have far too much onboarding on its homepage which was often perceived as tedious or overwhelming for new users.

Return users, in particular, wanted to be able to access their existing trips quickly rather than having to relearn the site each time they came back. Users articulated general confusion about where to look for their existing trips, in part due to the sheer amount of onboarding and tutorial options available:

“This is very typical of my Tripidee experience — it takes about 5 minutes every time to get my feet wet again” Val, 56

Suggestions or Get Suggestions Feature

We gathered an large number of insights that pointed to users not really understanding the value of Tripidee’s Suggestions feature. Tripidee currently uses the navigation heading ‘Suggestions’ and ‘Get Suggestions’ interchangeably which was perplexing for many users. The Suggestions page is a section where users can ask for suggestions of places to visit from their friends on Facebook, get in touch with a travel agent, or share a URL by email. Many users assumed that getting suggestions was a more of a ‘share feature’ between other users on the site — a place where they could swap travel ideas. Val, a return user expressed her frustration with the suggestions feature:

“Teach me the value of suggestions. I need functional tabs — suggestions doesn’t belong up here” Val, 56

Users were also confused as to why ‘travel agents’ were being suggested to them as it felt like they were being invited to leave the site.

Share Page

The ‘Share’ page of the site, as the label suggests, allowed users to share and collaborate on their trips with others. However, clicking on the navigation label brought up a variety of confusing options such as ‘embed code’ for the trip that was being planned. Users generally expressed difficulty in trying to share their trips with others and wanted a way for those who weren’t members of Tripidee to ‘just view’ a trip without forcing them to have to sign up. Usability issues in terms of accessing shared trips even after signing up were also common among users that we tested with.

Explore Page

The Explore tab of the site takes a user to a page that displays popular trips from other users within the Tripidee Community. Users generally responded positively to this section of the site. However, many first time users were confused about what they would find under the Explore heading, suggesting that the navigation label wasn’t adequately expressing its purpose. More seasoned meticulous planners expected to find trips in the Explore tab that were either heavily reviewed or made by travel experts. All of these insights suggested that the label ‘Explore’ was not matching up with user’s mental models.

Create a Trip Page

Creating a trip on Tripidee happens via a clear ‘Create a Trip’ CTA within the Overview section of the site.

Usability tests revealed frustrations about being led to a page with three CTAs: Add your First Stop, Get the Tripidee Button, and Get Suggestions. Users eager to create their first trip expressed confusion about being offered so many divergent choices when all they wanted to do was start trip planning.

Overview and Map Pages

The Overview page of Tripidee’s website allows the user to view all the stops they’ve added to a trip as tiles with images that the site automatically scrapes from Google.

These tiles vary in size depending on the level of priority allotted to them when they were added. This page was of huge value to the wanderlust travelers that we interviewed who wanted a ‘pinterest style’ overview of their added stops. The only source of frustration that users expressed on this page was the inability to drag their tiles around. Users also expressed wanting more ways to organize their collated tiles through filters or dates.

The ‘Map’ page prioritizes a larger map view, with added stops displayed along the left side of the page. Few users found this page particularly useful. The meticulous planners who wanted their stops, calendar and map view displayed all at once found very little value in the overview and map pages and wanted to be led straight to the Plan Days/Calendar part of the site where they could build their itineraries in full detail.

Plan Days/Calendar Page

The Plan Days/Calendar page of Tripidee’s site is where the magic happens. Users are able to see all of their added stops and drag them into specific days to see how they relate to each other geographically. However, this page was also where we understandably received the most insights. Users’ mental models at times didn’t match the workings of the system. Users expressed wanting the ability to adjust their view in terms of how much real estate was taken up by either the map or the itinerary. Many users thought that certain section titles looked clickable and were confused to find them unresponsive, such as the airport and lodging headers.

It was on this particular page that we first heard desires for filters by either category or colour that expressed the nature of the added stops. At the time of our research all tiles were grey with black text, with only the durations being given a yellow colour, which confused users. Users expressed wanting to see their itinerary by week or month rather than just by day. Users also struggled to find a nearly invisible horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of this page that allowed them to view the rest of the days of their trip.

Lastly, this page has three sets of navigation available on it. A tab navigation for the page, a CTA navigation, and a top navigation. Users were observed to use only around 4 out of the 16 available.

The Tripidee Button

At the time of our first meeting they had just launched the ‘Tripidee button’, a browser extension much like Pinterest’s browser button. This Chrome extension allows the user to capture an interesting activity or place that they have found on the web and incorporate it at the click of a button into one of their existing trips in Tripidee. As with all new features, they were excited at being able to offer their users an even easier way to add stops to their itineraries. The option to download the button was given 3 primary CTAs on the homepage, none of which adequately explained its functionality.

Frustrations also surfaced during its use. Clicking on the button brings up an ‘Add Stop to a Trip” popup that is incredibly similar, but not identical, to the ‘Add a Stop’ popup. Users expressed finding it odd that these popups were not the same and the information hierarchy was so different. The primary ‘Save’ CTA was often missed due to it being located at the top of the popup as opposed to at the bottom. Some users didn’t enjoy having to enter additional details while their main task was searching the web for stops. Some wanted to merely add the stop to a particular trip and organise its position within the trip at a later time. Darren, a meticulous planner, expressed this well when he said:

“I expected the button to bring me back to the existing trip I am planning. Now I have to do all these extra clicks.” Darren, 49

We had a wealth of incredible insights ranging from holistic mental models through to granular usability issues. We decided to create two separate problem statements to refer back to during our ideation phase. One for the meticulous planner, and one for the wanderlust traveler:

These two problem statements captured the needs of these disparate users and were important yardsticks that we returned to time and again while creating our concepts. We took measures a step further and created design principles to ensure our concepts didn’t become too tangential. We created four primary principles:

We were almost ready to start creating some tangible concepts and solutions to the opportunities that we identified in the research phase, but we made the decision to conduct further competitive analysis at this stage as we had such specific usability issues that needed attention.

Looking into competitors at this point gave us a chance to do a targeted sweep of how others were addressing some of the issues that we identified. We wanted to ensure that we were going to be designing solutions that were in keeping with other usability trends on the market, rather than straying from mental models that users had already acquired from competitors.

We initially examined 9 competitors that included: Roadtrippers, Tripit, Travefy, TripHobo, Pineapple, Kayak, Airbnb, Pinterest and Trip Advisor. Each of these contained aspects of design that were relevant to the concepts we were hoping to build.

Roadtrippers for example provided the perfect source of inspiration for a potential filtering system that would allow users to categorise their stops by activity or type, be it food and drink, lodging, or leisure.

TripHobo provided interesting ways of visually expressing travel times and distances while also showing how icons could once again be used effectively. TripHobo provided its users with effective ways to plan their trips together using chat FABs.

Lastly, Airbnb Guidebooks provided us with an out-of-the-box way of attempting to attract the third package traveler persona that our initial research had identified. Airbnb as a company is a yardstick for how to generate a sense of community. The Guidebooks section of their site provides comprehensive guides to cities as created by their members — much like the Explore feature strives to do on Tripidee. We chose to learn from Airbnb’s strong use of white space, as well as their intuitive navigation and use of filters to inform our later designs.

We shared these insights with our creative director who encouraged us to pursue some of the relevant usability patterns that we observed in the above three sites. We were all systems go on building out concepts — we had a problem to solve, principles to adhere to and a solid competitive analysis, complete with travel-related interface design patterns.

We did some high level sketches as a means of communicating all of our ideas to each other using paper, whiteboards, the works. We chose not to test with paper prototypes due to the details and sheer amount of features involved. Once we had a bunch of our ideas brainstormed, communicated and tested against our design principles, we set about building concepts in Sketch that we would later input into Invision.

Homepage Iterations

Iteration 1 (My homepage)

This iteration strove to be more pared down than the current Tripidee offering. I wanted first time users to know that they were definitely on a travel website and thusly I chose leisure-specific imagery as well as one clear CTA for creating a trip, as this was Tripidee’s primary value proposition as articulated by our clients. I followed this by creating a small, stepped onboarding section that used icons and short, targeted content to convey how Tripidee works.

I also wanted to address the lack of consistency in the labels by changing the ‘Explore’ navigation heading to ‘Get Inspired’. ‘Get Inspired’ was to be the new home for all things community related within the site. We decided to A/B test these changes in content in order to find the perfect way for communicating where users could acquire travel suggestions and share their trips with others.

Iteration 2

My colleague developed a second concept that also used more travel-related imagery with only one major CTA visible above the fold on a user’s screen. The ‘Home’ navigation header was removed in the hope that users would naturally click on the logo in the top left hand corner of the screen in order to navigate home.

The Tripidee button was renamed ‘Tripidee Extension’ and was moved in order to make the top navigation less busy. We wanted to communicate the value of the button before presenting users with a download CTA, in response to most users not understanding what the extension provided towards their trip planning.

Iteration 3

I wanted to test an additional ‘return user’ homepage that forwent all onboarding and greeted a logged in user upon returning to the site with a CTA to resume working on the last trip that they were building. We wanted to give these users ‘a sense of place’ by recognizing them as return users and ensuring they were able to access their trips without having to sift through onboarding or tutorials.

Plan Day/Calendar Page Iterations

This page benefitted the most from our second round of competitive analysis. We experimented with the use of filters, similar to those used by other companies such as Roadtripper in order to help users organise their stops according to the primary categories mentioned in interviews. These included activities, food and drink, lodging and outdoor activities.

Users mentioned wanting to see more days within their trips which inspired us to experiment with a horizontal vs. vertical day views. The distance between each stop was introduced as an icon spacer between each activity. We also experimented with gray scale color coding and numbering to allow users to see how their stops translated geographically and allow them to identify their stops more easily on the map view.

Lastly, we experimented with different map sizes on this page ahead of further usability tests to get a feel for the perfect amount of real estate that this feature required. We wanted to understand what people wanted to see and find the best, most balanced way of visually accommodating their needs.

‘Add Stop’ Popups

Iterations of the ‘Add Stop’ popups were all experiments in information hierarchy. We first added a drop down field for indicating the ‘type of stop’ that the user was adding. We experimented with ‘showing/hiding’ fields in keeping with our design principle to ‘meet in the middle’ between our target personas. We added a download link for the Tripidee Extension to show the user ‘in-situ’ how it might be beneficial for future trips. Clicking on this link led the user to a page that described exactly how the extension worked, what the icon looked like and where it would live in their browser navigation bar. We also specifically gave the user the option to search outside of Tripidee to ensure our design principle ‘give me a sense of place’ was being adhered to.

‘Get Inspired’ — the new ‘Explore Page’

The Explore page was previously a tiled list of trips from other members of the community. With insights from our competitive analysis of Airbnb, we decided to incorporate the use of filters by ‘type of stops’ added. From our interviews we gathered that many users relied heavily on reviews when selecting destinations that they wanted to add to their trips. This insight provided us with another way to incite a community element within Tripidee through reviews and ratings. We employed an information hierarchy and feature set very similar to Airbnb’s Guidebooks page. The ‘Get Inspired’ page was our left-field way to introduce something slightly out the box to our clients, in an attempt to engage package travelers who use more conventional methods of exploration such as budget, reviews and ratings.

We sprinkled in a few additional features based on the insights received from our initial interviews and our subsequent usability tests with concepts. These included different types of chat features and ways of helping users within their collaborative settings to express prioritisation of certain stops over others. We experimented with a voting system on each stop as tiny ‘thumbs up or thumbs down’ icons. We were finally ready to start testing with users. However, with only a day left, I had a small eureka, so I decided to yield to it.

It dawned on me that we we needed a lot more map size variations to test for the map featured within the Plan Days/Calendar section of the site. After all, this page was where the bulk of all planning was conducted for both user types. I suggested conducting A/B tests with various map sizes on our path to finding the perfect position and amount of real estate for this all-important feature.

Putting it to the Usability Test

We tested our concepts with 3 wanderlust travelers, 2 meticulous planners and 1 package traveler.

Our tests comprised a series of travel planning tasks starting with creating a trip, adding a stop, to collaborating or sharing the trip and finally looking for inspiration. The insights that we gained helped us chisel away at our concepts in our attempt to create an MVP that fulfilled our design principles and helped our users have a more frictionless experience when engaged with the site.

Returning to Mental Models — Improving the Plan Days/ Calendar Page

Key insights that made a huge impact were primarily centered on the ‘Plan Days /Calendar’ Page where users shared their thoughts about how they prioritise a map view and their expectations from maps in general, as well as their views on having more filters available to them:

“Categories are extremely helpful. I would love a list of all the food and beverage that I’ve had on one day.” Lauren, meticulous planner, 37

“When I plan I want to see the stops — I want labels on this filter thing here. I don’t really need the map.” Romain, wanderlust traveler, 22

Other interesting insights spoke to a concept that seemed so obvious when articulated by the users and actually made us feel quite embarassed for not having developed a concept for it ourselves. Michael and Andrea, two wanderlust travelers that we interviewed independently mentioned the same thing:

“Map could be a lot smaller — I usually see maps as a small embed — and when you click on it, it enlarges.” Andrea, package traveler, 33

“Smaller map reduces feeling of clutter. Map needs to be expandable though.” Michael, wanderlust traveler 26

‘Get Inspired’ — the new ‘Explore’ Page

Our out of the box concepts for engaging the Tripidee community through Airbnb-style ratings, reviews and filters were received very well:

“I love this. Get inspired by our community. I like the tile approach with all the different trips.” Lauren, 37

We went for a clean tiled layout that favoured strong travel imagery and explanatory content. We were pleased to find that the label ‘Get Inspired’ met user expectations of hoping to find community-related content within. Matthew said of this page:

“This is a community, not just a faceless expert.” Matthew, 40

We came away from the concepting phase and subsequent usability tests with an understanding that:

  • Users didn’t desire a large map view, but wanted the ability to expand it when necessary
  • Users found having the ability to organise their stops by type incredibly helpful
  • Users emphasised the collaborative element of Tripidee as a major source of its value
  • Users expressed a desire for a place within the site to store all of their booking information much like on other sites such as Travefy that scrapes information automatically from confirmation emails and the like

We synthesised all of our primary insights into a converged prototype using Sketch and Invision. We used the few days between our next client meeting and another round of testing to brainstorm what our empty states would look like as our designs in the concept phase were not yet fully linked.

Once again we created an affinity diagram in order to ensure that only the most effective features, content and hierarchy changes went through to the prototyping phase. It was important for us to stay organised and structured due to the sheer amount features, content and hierarchy changes that we wanted to implement. Having a wall of our insights visually available made a world of difference in our ability to make design decisions quickly to justify the incorporation of each feature set into our converged prototype.

Homepage

The two homepage iterations tested better than we had anticipated due in part to the more travel-related imagery used to truly give users a ‘sense of place’ and provide consistency throughout the site. Users were happy to see screenshot-based onboarding replaced by a more iconised and content-rich flow diagram which took up very little real estate and was followed by the ‘Create a Trip CTA’.

The Tripidee button was given its own section on the homepage, just under the onboarding flow diagram, with a small paragraph explaining its value followed by a ‘tell me more’ button. Clicking on this button took the user to a separate screen that visually explained the value of the tripidee button.

The last section of the homepage contained a link to the ‘Get Inspired’ section of the site after a tiled display of trips by other users.

Plan Days/Calendar

Users enjoyed having added visibility through thumbnails, but expressed wanting more geographically-related tools:

“I want to see where all the activities [and] stops cluster together.” Daren, 49

We incorporated labels above certain crucial feature sets such as the module that contained all added stops. This greatly decreased user confusion. We introduced an ‘upvote/downvote’ system as thumbs up/thumbs down icons on each added stop — however this was not effective enough a tool and confused a lot of users who misconceived them to be ‘rating’ icons:

“I want to give a score instead — if you could rank that more — who’s in and who’s out.” Daren, 49

Another user claimed the same:

“I think the thumbs up thumbs down is a rating. I’d rather chat with other trip members.” Lynn, 57

All users that we tested naturally gravitated to a chat feature that we built which was previously a FAB (floating action button) for Tripidee’s support chat feature. However, given how users emphasised Tripidee’s true value as being in it’s collaborative element, we made the design decision to remove the underused support feature and replace it with a chat FAB.

We experimented with two final versions of the expandable map view that we introduced into our converged prototype. The iteration that went through to our MVP contained a lot of white space and had a drop down menu that allowed users to select the particular day that they wanted to view more closely on the map.

‘Add Stop’ Popup

This popup, though seemingly small, was where we truly exercised our design principles of wanting to ‘meet users in the middle’ by allowing users to show/hide the amount of detail that they wanted to fill out and be presented with. Understand that ‘consistency is key’ we had this pop-up share the same information architecture as the one generated upon using the browser extension. And to ‘show only what’s necessary’ we only included the fields that the users specifically articulated were important to them.

As with the eureka moment regarding the map view, testing our concepts sparked a small moment of panic over whether our navigation labels were successfully helping users find what they were looking for. We decided to do a last minute validation of labels ahead of finalising our designs through a card sort. We wanted to make sure that the users understood what they were going to find on the site, and where they could find what they were looking for.

We conducted a card sort with three users, one from each persona identified at the outset of the project in order to ensure that our navigation labels communicated their value correctly to our entire user base. We found that these users naturally associated ‘Get Inspired’ with trips from the community. Users also grouped together ‘Add Stop’ with ‘adding a location’ and ‘adding an activity’. Bingo bango.

Once again, we set about chiselling away at our design in pursuit of a functional and successful MVP to present to our clients. The culmination of our efforts can be viewed here.

Lurking constraints

All in all, we were incredibly pleased with the wealth of insights we were able to gather and implement across our designs. However, we would have loved to have had more than three weeks to build our concepts out to more thoroughly ensure that they catered to all our target users. We would have also welcomed the chance to run prototypes by users from all walks of life and geographic locations, however, the timelines and scope of the project did not allow us to fully exercise that desire. We made note of these in our future considerations to hand off to our clients.

We suggested to our client that further UX research would be required on areas that were out of scope for our three week sprint.

These areas included:

● More label validation through card sorts with more users

● Exploring different ways of building in chat functionality and voting features for collaborating users to express their priorities

● Conducting more user research into user’s desires for wanting to store all their travel and event details in one place. What kind of capabilities would users be expecting from a feature like that?

● Conducting contextual inquiries with users in order to better understand the contexts within which the product is used

We were not able to fully explore user needs and wants in-situ or during their travel experience. Tripidee currently has a very basic app for users to take their trips on the road, as well as the ability to print out their trips. Exploring this side of their product in full would have required a contextual inquiry approach to understand some of the issues that users briefly touched on in our interviews.

We suggested that Tripidee do a full UX overhaul of their app, to explore the user’s pain-points, needs, goals and frustrations with the on-the-go app. A form of contextual inquiry was recommended in order to ascertain exactly what their users really needed within their specific travel environments and to observe how they currently dealt with mobile data-related issues. We also suggested to Tripidee that they think about potentially partnering with a mobile phone network that offers data bundles.

Users expressed frustrations with their current ability to share trips, and often ran into an inability to access their shared trip even after signing up. We suggested making trip sharing more frictionless through a possible Gmail integration for quicker sign up. We also proposed allowing users the ability to select whether they would like a collaborator to ‘Edit’ or just ‘View’ a trip. This change has already been implemented.

Lastly, the designs we developed catered to the two primary personas that we identified at the outset of this project, the meticulous planner and the wanderlust traveler. However, we strongly encouraged that Tripidee also attempt to cater to the third persona, the package traveler, in order to make the product more versatile without compromising its specific niche in the travel planning world. After all, two out of the ten users we tested were package traveller types, who had very different mental models of travel. These users would probably have found value in our conceptual ‘Get Inspired’ section, but further testing would be needed to cater more acutely to their specific needs, as they currently fell out of scope on the site.

Implemented Changes

We developed an incredible relationship with our Hawaiian clients who were in awe of the sheer wealth of information we were able to glean from their user base in such a short time. We received a beautiful Hawaiian care pack as a thank you for our intense three week sprint. Our work was handed off straight away to UI designers with some of the changes already being implemented by their in-house developer.

Tripidee was a real balancing act between UI and UX. I understood the importance of using user insights concurrently with an analysis of competitors as a way to create meaningful, functional changes quickly, particularly within such a saturated market. In a three week sprint you don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel by creating new design patterns. Understanding the way users planned trips through in-depth interviews was a huge learning curve in the delicate interplay of mental models versus system models. I also felt privileged for the opportunity and challenge to work remotely throughout the entirety of this project as it greatly improved my ability to communicate my design decisions using every medium available.


Click on the image below to read more about my how I created a mobile web-based platform for delivering restaurant meals to cancer patients and their caregivers on chemotherapy treatment days

Or click on this image to skip back to my experience with designing a family app!

nicolefermie

the same thing we do every night Pinky, design to take over the world.

Nicole Fermie

Written by

Playful human in training

nicolefermie

the same thing we do every night Pinky, design to take over the world.

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