Do what the locals do.
Problem
We believe millennials, who like to travel, need a better way to mitigate the stress of planning and budgeting their trip because of the lack of a streamlined process or centralized location to help them prepare.
Solution
Offer a one stop shop solution to help people plan for their whole trip, while bringing together communities by sharing culturally authentic travel experiences.
The Process
1
User-centered research approach, leading to affinity map excercise to uncover pain points, needs, and goals of traveling millennials as it relates to planning for trips.
2
Developed persona to fit the demographics of target audience. Prioritized the features and primary user flow to meet needs of users.
3
Utilized research and user insights to strongly inform the design of the low and medium fidelity wireframes.
4
Iterated on designs and developed high fidelity wireframes on Figma to meet the primary user goals.
Discover
User Research
Exploration
To better understand my users, I developed a discussion guide for user interviews. I saw this method being the best way to gather raw insights from my users, letting them freely talk about their traveling experiences and pain points with planning. ​
Research Objectives
I interviewed 6 millennials who travel quite frequently - both nationally and internationally - to understand their experiences further, using guiding questions such as:
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What does your planning experience look like when preparing for a trip?
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How do you budget for your travels?
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Explain the kind of trips you explicitly plan for.
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What are your biggest pain points of planning out your travel?
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When you're in the actual location, how do you find things to do?
Original Hypothesis
Most people like to travel with a set budget in mind and need help planning that ahead of time.
That hypothesis turned out to be incorrect.
What I Learned
Most of these travelers don’t actually budget explicitly – they like to plan the larger expenses at the beginning of the trip, but don’t ever know what their budget is upfront
"Want to do cool local activities, but that’s hard to find online. Viator is too touristy. Getting a true local experience can be hard to plan for ahead of time."
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"Unless there’s some insane tourist attraction I’m aware of, I don’t know how to find the cool things to do in each city”
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"May know a lump sum ahead of time, but I'm not set on that number. Budgeting is not a priority for me – if I’m going far, I just spend what I need to”
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Post-Research Guiding Principles
The Problem
It’s extremely difficult to plan for a big trip and find authentic activities online prior to. Planning for a trip can be debilitating due to the multitude of websites, blogs, friend recommendations – most of them being extremely touristy activities.
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The Solution
These users are truly just looking for a one-stop shop to find authentic experiences in the place they are visiting.
Competitive Analysis
Researched 4 travel apps that claim they’re a one-stop shop
Pros
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Explore nearby places
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Recommended for you
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Walking tours, biking tours
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Allows for wish list
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Provides pre-made itinerary
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Provides travel stats & documents
Cons
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Very touristy, museum & tour heavy
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Hard to view multiple itineraries at once
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Discover section is hard to navigate
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Overloaded interface
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Can’t research within some apps
Affinity Mapping
Key turning point in my process - at this step, the app’s objective became very clear. Throughout the multitudes of interviews, I organized all insights into the following 7 key takeaways:
I’m willing to spend what I need to when traveling.
I want to do what the locals do.
I like to organize my travel plans prior to.
I don’t have a central location to help me plan.
I like spontaneity in a trip.
I am conscious of my spending while traveling.
I don’t like preparing logistics.
Define
Persona
After the affinity map exercise, I had a clear vision for who the user is, what motivates them, and how they like to approach their travel experiences. I determined the target user will be a mid-20s millennial, who is eager to travel and have authentic experiences while abroad. She wishes there was a one-stop-shop to help her plan trips with family & friends.
Feature Prioritization
To begin prioritizing my features, I started with a blank piece of paper and wrote out all the general ideas I had for the app, post user interviews, such as a shared expense calculator, culture tips, average of what visitors spend in that location, etc.
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Then, I bucked out those ideas into what I see as the “main buttons” for the app. Those navigation buttons were initially Profile, My Trips, Explore, and Add Trip.
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From there, I prioritized them by impact levels and by effort levels. I ended up focusing on the High Impact, Low Effort features for my initial iteration of my wireframes.
This process started with 6 different sketches, determining the most important user goals within the app. The site map helped me design the best layout for the entire experience.
The user flow helped me determine the specific instance and task I’d be designing for. The main goal for the user in the user flow will be able to discover local experiences in their desired destination, while easily adding to their travel wish-list in under 3 steps.
Site Map & User Flow
Design
Sketches
The knowledge I had on the user and their goal guided the user experience throughout my sketches. I thought about my competitive analysis and what made that user experience disruptive – I took those learnings to ensure my app’s experience was simple, straightforward, and led the user through a flow they were looking for.
Wireframes & Usability Testing
Low Fidelity (Pre-Usability Testing)
High Fidelity (Post-Usability Testing)
Deliver
