A user research initiative on more effective collaborative, group trip planning in the digital era

Trip planning should not be stressful – when resources and polls are constantly shared between trip mates across many platforms, it can get confusing to quickly identify everyone’s wants and make decisions.

Timeline

Aug '22 - Dec '22

Role

UX Research Lead

Collaborators

Alice Nie, An Tang, Serena Wecker

Project brief

Project Overview

How do we go about organizing trip planning in such a way that college students interest and research are easy to track?

We started by conducting a series of research methods that were more exploratory and vague, in order to gain a strong foundational understanding of the problem we were tackling. We first conducted contextual interviews in order to explore the problem space, ending with prototype testing to gather specific feedback on how well our product solved our defined problem.

Building understanding through contextual & user research

User interviews + Affinity mapping

“Sometimes the planning space gets so cluttered that I stop using it. There’s just so many links that I get anxious from choice overload"

We conducted user interviews, focusing on college students who have planned at least one group trip (of at least 3 people) in the past 6 months.

After conducting interviews, we grouped them through affinity clustering to get an overview of themes and pain points of group trip planning college students faced.

Customer Journey Map

Through interviews and observations, we mapped out a general flow for how students typically plan out their trips. We noted down pain points, areas where conflict may arise, and where processes may not be as efficient.

Through this macro level approach, we were able to identify a specific area we could hone our research on, and investigate more thoroughly - the stage of coming up with an itinerary and plan to satisfy everyone's wants/needs.

Prototyping and product validation

Design

Prototyping

Once we’ve identified several key areas to investigate, we created a series of storyboards to illustrate different scenarios users encounter, and how different concepts may appeal to users facing pain points/struggles identified.

We considering the context and scenarios which users encounter when planning trips through the user needs previously derived from discussions and walk the wall activities.

“As long as I can check off the item highest on my to do list, the trip is worth it”

From our storyboarding, we narrowed down the scope even more to prioritise the most impactful user needs and validated some of our assumptions on user needs:
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1. How clarity in personal interests can be surfaced to allow people to accommodate and be flexible (compromise) to other’s needs and wants when planning trips
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2. How the expectations of different members in the travel group can be efficiently communicated.
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3. How itinerary organization can be useful when determining what still needs to be planned

My teammate created the final prototypes, while I only helped setup a small design system.

For our final product deliverable, we designed an app to accommodate the following user needs through our different features:

1. Know each other’s priorities and trip planning styles - Traveler profiles page
2. Travel profiles: Maintain a clean planning space - Discussions page
3. Keeping track of polls and conversations - Resources page
4. Improved current planning tools, collating resources - Smart notifications