uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Zi Yuan

How to design a group trip planner by design thinking.

Why design a group trip planner?

When we travel with groups, it is hard to meet everyone’s preference and engage everyone in decision-making. It is also painful to share and discuss the information with the group. Jumping between platforms to collect trip information can be time-consuming. Therefore, there is a need to have a group trip planner. Below is my approach to solving this design challenge as a five-day project. As a fan of Game of Throne, I use the heroes as my personas.

Design Process

I broke the challenge into four tasks:
1. Understand the problem
2. Understand the users
3. Ideation & user journey
4. Interaction design and Prototype

Use whiteboard to analyze the challenge

User Goals with this app:
1. Collaborate with friends to plan a trip
2. Store and manage trip details

Constrains:
1. Mobile form factors
2. High income user who travel frequently
3. Leverage existing apps

Assumptions I came up with:
1. The user already has a group to travel with.
2. The group has agreed on a rough direction to go (Mexico, Europe).
3. The group have downloaded and registered the app.

Key success metrics:
1. Number of trips created on the app.
2. Number of shared messages or shared travel articles.
3. Retention Rate and profits.

Conducted User Research

I quickly interviewed 11 friends on their group trip planning experience, what apps do they use, and What pain points are remained.

Main Pain points:

1. How do I find trip information?

• Trip information are everywhere.
• It is hard to share or manage info within group.
• Start the plan from scratch is hard.

2. How do I share Information with my group?

• Discuss with friends from different locations and time zones.
• Plan trips to coordinate various preference and trip types.
• Share trip readings / bills / photos within group.

How might we empower the group to…

1. Find trip info (places, food, hotels) with third-party apps?
2. Share trip info to gather opinions from the group?

Create A New Trip by Starting Travel Group

Flow: Create trip — Invite friends — Add plan.

1. User will set the group size and trip type during on-boarding for personalized trip recommendation.
2. User will invite friends into group chat.
3. User can vote for recommended trip plans or POI.

Group Chat is the core foundation of the app.

Information can easily be shared and managed within travel groups.

Map out the userflow of TravelWe

Below are the userflow of the interface with interface click thru to explain the user journey for trip plan creation and collaboration experience.

I started with the information architectureThen I laid out the same information architecture with UI pages

Quick prototype walk-through

Credit: I applied elements from sketch freebies when creating mockups: Travelling App Template, Travelisto UI Kit, line icons.

Winter is coming! Sansa, let’s plan your trip to Winterfell (Trip Planning App) was originally published in uxdesign.cc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.