“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” — Of Mice and Men
If you travel you learn that things don’t always go according to plan. There are delayed flights, disappointing accommodations, flat tires, and inappropriate footwear. Your best-laid plans are no match for reality. That doesn’t mean you don’t travel — or make travel plans. Traveling, whatever the purpose, is part of our lives.
Travel is also one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries. According to statista.com, travel contributed over 7.6 trillion dollars to the global economy in 2016. The internet has played a large role in the growth of the travel industry. Many people book travel and make plans with their mobile devices, especially millennials. One of the problems travelers face is the chaotic nature of travel itself. Travel is often unpredictable and spontaneous, resulting in impulsive and disordered planning.
Objective
The goal was to build a travel itinerary planner for millennials. My team included three UX designers: Cass Koller, Harrison Bunyard, and myself. Our task was to help travelers make arrangements, either as individuals or part of a group. The solution needed to provide up-to-date information for transportation and lodging along with any other details travelers might need. It had to be a native mobile application using the capabilities of current iOS and Android operating systems. We had three weeks to complete this project.
My experience designing this app resembled some of my experiences traveling. There were roadblocks, surprising twists, and a few unexpected turns. The final solution did meet the goal, but not in the way I imagined it would. Designing digital products to solve human problems can be challenging. Thankfully we had a proven process to follow. The result was a mobile app that millennial travelers actually wanted.
Research
Our research plan focused on answering the following questions:
- Who is the user and what are their needs?
- How might we make travel easier and more collaborative?
- What information should be included in an itinerary planner?
- What needs are not being met by current travel planning apps?
- What are the current travel planning apps?
We created a survey using SurveyMonkey. Since we were using a free version of the service, we were limited to asking respondents 10 questions. Those questions were:
- What is your age?
- How many times per year do you arrange travel that requires making arrangements? (eg. lodging, air travel etc.)
- What’s your personal travel style?
- When choosing a destination, what is most important to you?
- When organizing/coordinating travel plans what do you use?
- If you use an app, which one(s)?
- If you’ve traveled solo, what obstacles did you encounter?
- If you’ve planned travel with a group what obstacles did you have?
- What’s your bag/luggage packing style?
- Would you be willing to do an email interview for more in-depth questions? If so, please provide your email.
Results
We received 31 responses to our survey. After eliminating answers from two respondents outside our target age group (18–35), we had 29 people and 261 answers. (Three people agreed to answer open-ended questions via email).
This data gave us a picture of our user, whom we called Nadine.
Nadine travels 2–3 times per year, uses AirBnB, Hopper, and Notes to plan travel. She relies on group texts/chats to communicate with travel partners. She’s “well prepared/obsessive and a minimalist” when it comes to packing. Nadine’s priorities start with destination, followed by climate, date(s) of travel, and finally, cost. Who she goes with is either the least important factor or something not always in her control. Accommodating her travel partners’ preferences is one of her pain-points.
Nadine provided us with a lot of information about the way our user typically travels, but we still weren’t sure how to make travel easier or more collaborative. We decided to look at the competition to see what information and features existing travel apps had.
Competitive Analysis
We needed to gather data about current travel-related apps, their users, and if there were any unmet needs or pain-points. The only way to do that was to download the most popular travel apps, use them, and take notes.
I made a chart comparing features and the success/popularity of each app. It was impossible to know how often each app was being used, the way it was being used, or how long the average user engaged with the app. What I did discover was that the most common features were lists and directions. Apps like Google Trips and Voyager collect users metadata. This data is then used to create a “memory” of actual trips the user has taken. Others, like Roadtrippers and PackKing, attempt to fill a smaller travel-related niche. Roadtrippers allows users to navigate to multiple destinations while on a road trip. PackKing is a simple packing list application.
Officially Stuck
Some of the apps were really good and competing with them was unrealistic. My competitive analysis didn’t reveal any clear opportunities. I reminded myself that we were trying to compete in an industry worth ~$8 trillion.
I had made the mistake of assuming this was going to be an easy assignment. Travel was fraught with challenges. And our users were solving those challenges by using a combination of successful apps. Texting was an excellent way to communicate travel plans. Booking lodging, air travel, and ground transportation is a breeze thanks to companies like Air BnB, Skyscanner, and Uber. Apps like Pinterest, Evernote, and Notes are already among millennials’ most-used apps. Yelp can tell you where to eat, Maps can get you there, and Transit will tell you when the next train is arriving.
Our project was officially stuck in traffic.
Planning
We were a week and a half into a three-week project and the only deliverables we had were a Persona and User Story Map. We held a team meeting to discuss our options.
We could send out a new survey with different questions. We could mockup a design with all the features we thought our user needed. Or, we could plan a hypothetical trip as a team, using the same tools as our users, and see what happened.
The empathy moment
This turned out to be an insight-filled exercise. We assumed our users were likely living and working apart from one another. This meant limiting our communication to text or email. We also gave ourselves a time limit of 4 hours to simulate spontaneous planning. It took us 3.5 hours of brainstorming ideas of where to go, what to do, and when before we finally reached a consensus. It took less than half an hour to sort out transportation, lodging, and create a packing list.
This challenge helped us empathize with our user. We realized we weren’t going to disrupt the travel industry. We weren’t going to design ONE app to rule them all. And we weren’t going to change the habits of our users.
Our user had already told us:
- She typically makes plans last minute
- She wants to discover new places
- She wants to do activities she finds interesting
The user was asking for a pre-travel, destination discovery app. Nadine is not planning a trip to Hawaii six months from now. She’s trying to decide what to do for the weekend. She doesn’t need directions. She doesn’t need help booking a room, finding a restaurant, or communicating with her travel partners. She needs help deciding where to go and why.
We finally had a promising direction and a problem we could design a solution for…but it didn’t match our business needs. Our challenge was to design a travel itinerary planner. Our research was telling us no one was going to use it.
Thankfully, we had access to an experienced mentor. We sat down with Frank Dankwa and explained our dilemma.
Here’s what he told us:
“If a stakeholder/client comes to you and says, ‘I need a website,’ it’s your job to find out why. We do research in order to validate those assumptions. If you conclude that a website is not the best way to meet the client’s needs, you’re obligated to present that to him along with a better solution. Figure out what the user wants and square that with what the client actually needs.”
Officially Unstuck
Our research was pointing us in an unexpected direction. With Frank’s encouragement, we decided to follow it. Nadine wanted to plan travel to new places and do things that fit her interests. We had been too hung up on the term “planning” to consider that it might also mean “discovering,” or “deciding.” We had assumed she already knew where she was traveling and what she was going to do when she got there. We assumed her biggest problem was planning travel when it wasn’t. She wanted a good reason to go somewhere, anywhere.
Design & Testing
We made a conscious decision not to build a travel itinerary planner. The new plan was to make an app that would inspire and inform spontaneous short-term travel. Our concept involved pairing activities with destinations. Activities would match user interests. Destinations would correlate to the user’s location information. Users would need enough information about these pre-planned trips to make a decision. They would also need to be able to share these trip ideas with friends.
Now that we had a plan it was time to get creative. I sketched out a sitemap, feature list, page list, and user flow.
There were a lot of different ideas brewing at this point. We had narrowed our scope and made a list of critical features. We agreed that our user should be able to open our app and immediately start browsing travel ideas. It was a simple idea but we needed to put pen to paper and start testing.
We estimated that we could design a solution with ten screens or less. I assigned myself six of the pages and sketched four versions of each page. We compiled our mockups, voted on the most promising designs and made a paper prototype.
Our paper prototype revealed inconsistencies with our navigation icons, and information architecture. Additionally, our homepage layout and filter options were confusing. Using the whiteboard we hashed out these issues as a team. When they were finally resolved we cranked out our high-fidelity wireframes.
Now that we had our wireframes created and prototyped, we decided to test them. We asked users to complete the following tasks:
- sign up and follow the onboarding process
- browse trips, like and share one of them
- filter trips by activity
- change their profile information, and
- create a note.
The homepage was our hub. It was where users would find recommended travel ideas. By recommending trips, users would have an easier time deciding where to go and what to do. If they didn’t want recommendations we allowed them to browse by activity or location. A final filter option allowed users to filter by time, distance, and budget.
User Interface Design
Branding was an important first step in the interface design process. We were designing a product for adventure-seeking millennials. These users often work in non-traditional service jobs where Saturday and Sunday are not a days off. I decided to name our app ‘Funday’ in honor of any day reserved for rest, relaxation, and fun.
I used Google’s Material Design standards as a guide. The font was Roboto and the Primary Colors were chosen using the Color Tool found at material.io/color. This color tool helped me to make a color/font choice that was accessible to all users, including those with visual impairments.
Nature was the main inspiration. I chose colors that reflected the earth, sky, and plant life, i.e. orange-brown, blue, and green.
Feedback & Changes
In the process of refining the UI of this app, I concluded a menu was unnecessary. Users could navigate anywhere in the app by choosing either activities or destinations. Notes and additional settings could be found on the profile page. This resulted in a cleaner layout. A final round of testing was conducted. User’s appreciated the UI choices but offered some helpful feedback.
Here are some of the changes made based on that feedback:
- The new user survey was the final step in the onboarding process. The original design was one long page which required a lot of scrolling. Breaking the survey into three pages with copy indicating the user’s progress and the ability to skip this step made for a better experience.
- When users clicked on a curated trip they were taken to a “Details” page where they could learn more. This page was intended to provide helpful information and lead the user to make a decision. There was no call-to-action to facilitate this so one was added.
- When saving/liking trips (via heart icon) it was unclear where those trips could be found in the future. Clicking the “save trip” button now takes the user to her profile page where they can be reviewed.
4. The profile page not only displayed “liked” trips, it was a place to indicate specific interests and create notes. Test subjects indicated that it was unclear if these trips and interests were unique to the user and suggested changing the copy to make it clear.
5. Finally, the ad hoc camping icons used to represent activities and interests were hard to decipher. A satisfactory solution would involve creating custom icons for specific activities, and adding text labels to make it clear what those activities were. This change would be made in Sprint #2
Summary
Drawing a conclusion from the data we collected was the most challenging part of this project. It was tempting to dump features into a solution and hope for the best. We had to empathize with our user, look at the data from a different perspective, and seek outside advice. Taking the time to do those things prevented us from designing an expensive app that no one wanted.
Illness and a family emergency also hindered our progress early on. These unexpected challenges required patience, compassion, and some creative collaboration. We were behind schedule for ⅔ of the project which created extra stress. Staying positive and focused allowed us to break through those challenges, work together to create a solution and meet our deadline.
