March - April 2023
Kate Ridd, Caleb Anderson, Zhenya Heywood
Overview
Our group was tasked to design and build a travel itinerary planner. Not an application for booking trips, but an app to help travelers plan their travel as individuals and with other people.
Because planning and communication of trips happens in various ways and can at times seem unstructured, our challenge was to figure out what information would be helpful to include in this planner. Our task was to create a helpful tool that accomplishes the task of organizing the travel information and communication around it.
User Research
The first thing we did was create a survey to see how people plan their travel. We created a form with Google Forms and shared it with all of our friends and family. We posted the form on all of our social media pages as well. For our interviews, we were able to meet with our families and friends who all enjoy frequent group travel.
Our questions asked people about travel frequency, their budget, how they communicate, and which tools and methods they currently use. Through our interview process, we went deeper into these questions and then later combed through and organized all the information we had gathered in Figma.
Here are a few screenshots from our survey and interviews:
Market Analysis
As it was our first project and as I look back now, I see that we could have spent more time doing more research in the market place. I think that we felt really excited and probably a little rushed thinking we needed to jump in to our own user research. We did reference a few different sites like Expedia.com and Hotels.com.
We spent time to brainstorming potentials for direction and features, however I would say we spent a lot of time discussing and creating our questions for our surveys and interviews. Our goal was to really focus in and gather the wants and needs from our users so that we could start designing from from there.
Based on our findings, we started to see the trends and common answers. From these findings, we then created our user persona, Jacob. He values the experience of travel and travels frequently. His budget and itinerary are of importance to him as well. He wants a better way to manage his family’s itinerary as well as to be able to collaborate with other people he is traveling with. He feels that one of his biggest challenges is to keep everyone up to speed and on the same page.
From our findings and then through this persona, we were able to define the main goal for the app, which was to plan a successful and organized trip. The focus would be on group collaboration and communication. We then worked on our user flows and steps that were needed to accomplish building out our user story map.
I really enjoyed this phase of the project. My brain really enjoys organizing, structuring, and contemplating the flow of actions and sequences of design. With so many options and potentials for this project, I feel that one of my strengths was to help our group reel back all the potentials and features that could be possible and stay focused in on a clear course of action and steps that would help our user accomplish their goal of planning a successful trip as a group.
There were features that we continued to refine and some features that we decided to leave behind, as they didn’t necessarily support our minimum viable product. We had speculated about possibilities such as app integrations with larger search engines and travel sites, however based on our user research, we saw that people weren't asking for this. Their main object was to be able manage their collaboration and communication on their travel plans into one place. This was our "why" which then gave us our "what" to focus in on. Based on what they wanted, we decided to design and build out the foundational pieces around these points first.
After lots of time and team collaboration, this was what our final user story map looked like:
Wire Framing
Our next step was to start wireframing our user story map and we were super excited to start this process. This was the first time that we had used Figma so there was definitely a learning curve for us all.
This was so fun to see everything start to develop visually. As a team we worked together through every step to make sure that everything flowed and was prototyped correctly. During this phase, we were still working through the process of refining the app as well.
We conducted more user testing at this point on the prototype and got some helpful feedback. We needed to add in some "back buttons" on many of the pages. Our instructors gave us a lot of help with the Home and Trips page layouts. We had feedback from users on how some of the icons weren't quite as they would have anticipated, so we worked through different variations of icons to find some that would be a better fit and feel for the app.
I feel like another way in which I was able to help contribute to this project, was that I have experience with other types of design software. While there is still so much for me to learn within Figma, I felt comfortable using the tools as they felt similar to other that I’ve used in graphic and web design projects. I feel like this helped us to get our UI feeling and looking clean during this phase. I feel happy that I could help out the team as some of them had never used design software before.
Here are a few screenshots of our wireframes:
Styling and Content
One thing that we focused on for this phase was to not to try to “reinvent the wheel” so to speak. We started to look at some other apps out there and get some inspiration for the user interface.
We choose to feature the color blue because can be a popular brand color, for good reason. It can feel calming, soothing, and positive. In many cultures, it's also used viewed as a color of authority, confidence, safety, and loyalty.
First we found the image that we wanted to use for our login screen. We then pulled some colors out of it to use for our color palette.
In many ways, our styling and content continued over from our wireframing design since we had some great user feedback with our testing. We learned that these users enjoyed the first prototype feel and flow, so we kept this design very much in line with that. We did some more market research on some other apps such as Discord and FB Messanger to again, get some inspiration for certain features such as the calendar, messaging, group planning, and itinerary features.
We understood and felt that keeping things simple and clean was important. We had some amazing mentors to help us with this as we worked. In this phase as well, we continued to refine frames, features, and interactions where needed.
Final Result
We had so much fun with this travel itinerary project. We really enjoyed the collaboration. I love to work with teams because I feel that there is just so much to learn from one another. Everyone brings their unique perspective and their unique contributions which in my opinion, make for projects with amazing potential and outcomes.
Here are a few screenshots of our final product.
