UX Case Study: Simplifying Travel Planning
Overview
I love to travel and I love to plan, I love to research holiday destinations and I make meticulous itineraries. Whenever I travel in a group, I am always relied on to be the lead planner and I often have friends asking for my previous trip itineraries. I also often hear of horror stories about terrible travel planning causing friends to fall out. This got me thinking:
- How might we transfer this trip planning experience to someone who is less experienced?
- How might we make it easier for group travellers to collaborate their ideas and expectations for planning their trip and to also be encouraged to participate in the planning process?
- How might we take the pain away from travel planning by making the process simpler?
Initial Brainstorming
I first brainstormed on what the main considerations are for people who are planning trips. Then I ranked these considerations by order of what is considered fist when planning a trip and other considerations that may come in later.
Problem Statements
A lead travel planner who feels overwhelmed by the amount of time and effort needed to plan a trip needs a way to consolidate and present this information in such a way which is easy to understand by themselves and other group members.
A lead travel planner who feels annoyed about planning where to go on holiday needs to collect everyone’s opinions and interests but faces different opinions and interests and lack of commitment.
A lead travel planner who feels drained about budgeting the costs of the trip needs to research, track and calculate the costs involved in the trip faces a tedious experience where the information is scattered.
Research
Surveys
I conducted an online survey using Google Forms and distributed this via social media. The reason I decided to do a quantitative survey was to gain better understanding of people’s travel habits, with the key question being how involved people are with the planning process and what portion play an active role.
I received 44 responses with the majority of participants being female and between the ages of 26 to 35. This survey ruled out participants who had not ever been part of a trip planned by themselves or someone in their group for leisure and overnight or more.
The survey questions were first grouped together then key findings were identified.
Interviews
To have a better understanding of the planning process, I have conducted 6 interviews with a mix of lead planners and those who play a more minor role in the planning process.
I believe it was important to incorporate both planners and followers because one of the most important aspects is how these two groups communicate during the planning process. It is important to know what considerations they have and how they feel about each stage of planning.
The most important questions asked included:
- What is your research process?
- How do you consolidate this research data?
- How to you go about planning your trip based on your research?
- Do you use any digital tools?
- What are some frustrations you have faced when planning a trip?
Some interesting insights that I have gained included:
- Most planners use online platforms such as Google Sheet/Google Docs to plan
- The process in which people plan are similar but the information architecture itself is quite varied across different planners
- For less tech savvy participants, they may only use chat applications to plan and record, they have also created a form of a sign up sheet to show commitment on Whatsapp
- All participants commented that it was important for the group to work together and compromise in order to make firm decisions
- I had originally planned on concentrating on the actually planning part but research data showed that the biggest pain point was consolidating the scattered data, especially linking logistics to destinations
Competitor Analysis
There are already a few trip planners both in app form and web form but from my research, none of the participants have used these tools despite them being on the top of the Google and PlayStore search results. Competitor analysis was conducted to identify features which already exist and if there were any gaps and opportunities.
TripIt
- App or Web
- Plan trips — Input accommodation/transport/itinerary details
- Share trips with others
- Forward confirmation emails (e.g. flight/hotels) to have it automatically added to your itinerary
Inspirock
- Input destination(s), dates and number of people, generates suggested itinerary
- Suggests sightseeing locations and activities
- Links to Tripadvisor and Airbnb on where to stay
- Generates to-do checklist of transportation/hotel booking
Travefy
- Trip planner aimed at “travel professionals” as travel agents and tour operators
- Similar to TripIt but places emphasis on large groups of travellers such as destination weddings and student associations
- Import existing reservations via email forward, CRM, supplier integrations or Travefy’s API
Research Synthesis
Affinity Mapping
I grouped all the research data into clusters with similar themes. This was used to form insights in the form of story cards.
There were 3 big clusters that were formed by smaller clusters thus containing more than one insight:
- Beginning the Travel Planning = Time + Deciding Where to Go
- Research to Itinerary = Itinerary Building + Research Channels + Consolidating Information
- Budgeting = Split Costs + Forecast
Empathy Mapping
Using the same research data, I sorted the data on the empathy map. From the empathy map, I was able to obtain further insights, identify pain points and derive my persona.
Personas
Based on the interviews, I have developed a primary and a secondary persona. The principal persona being Grace who acts as a lead planner for travel while the secondary persona is Gary who is more of a follower in terms of travel planning.
The product will be designed for Grace, but I felt that I needed to build a secondary persona because Gary has heavy influence on the decisions made by Grace. So Grace is basically a mix of all the lead planners I had interviewed while Gary was a mix of the participants who takes a back seat in travel planning.
User Journey
I mapped out the users’ journey for Grace (the travel planner) in order to identify the pain points of their journey from deciding to go on a trip to after returning from the trip.
A challenge which I faced was that although the steps in trip planning were quite consistent from the research, the order in which these steps were executed were quite varied. For example, while some had a destination in mind first, others decided on where to go based on whether cheap flights were available. I decided to map out a linear user journey map anyway because while the order in which the steps were executed seemed inconsequential, the pain points remained the same.
The MVP (For Insights)
With the insights that were derived from the affinity map and empathy map, I needed to find the minimum viable product (MVP) in order to decide what to focus on. The insights deemed of high value were the main pain points that was identified in the user journey map.
Out of the 27 insights, 13 fell in the high value and easy quadrant. From these 13 insights, some of them were actually overlapping and I placed them in clusters on the MVP chart.
To further narrow down the objectives, out of these 13 I selected 4 insights which covered the most important areas:
- As a group traveller, I need to record and consolidate all the expenses paid and incurred during the trip so that we can split the costs between travellers accurately.
- As a traveller planning my trip, I need to use consolidated information to build an itinerary so that I can make good use of my time travelling and I don’t get stuck with logistical problems when I am on the trip.
- As a traveller planning my trip, I need a platform where I can record and share information so that my group and I can review and contribute to the plan.
- As a traveller researching my trip, I need a more consolidated travel information platform so that I don’t have to cross reference multiple sources and save time.
Ideation
Sketches
Using the 4 insights, I ideated by sketching 6 ideas and features around each insight, I made sure to have the insight at the bottom of the page so that my objective is clear when I am sketching the features.
The MVP (For Features)
Because I sketched 6 features for each of the 4 insight, I ended up with 24 features and this needed to by further narrowed down. Hence I did another MVP to prioritise which features to include in my prototype.
Wireframes
Using Adobe Illustrator I created low fidelity wireframes of what my prototype will look like. This gave me a clear picture of all the overlays and artboards I would be needing so when I transferred this to Adobe XD I would only need to work on the UI aspect.
The reason I have made my prototype for use on the desktop is that most of the itinerary planning part is complex and people usually do this on the computer rather than on a mobile device.
I did, however, create mobile mockups because I felt the mobile version would be more applicable to when the user is actually travelling and need to access their itinerary, make simple edits and recording payment for consolidation after.
Prototype
Due to the constraints of the prototype, users need to follow the script in a very specific order. For example, when creating a new trip, users need to first add flight, then add accommodation and then shopping.
Usability Testing
I conducted 2 rounds of usability testing with 4 participants and reiteration in between. For the usability test, because of the constraints of the prototype, they had to follow very specific scripts. Some of the participants were not lead planners and they seemed to be confused about some features and found some irrelevant while the lead planners found most of the features useful.
From the original prototype, some of the feedback was as below:
- The colour coding and icons of the itinerary items were clear
- There was too much colour
- The payment screen was hard to understand and there were information gaps
- Liked the cost breakdown graph in the payment screen
- Adding payment is confusing
- The check-in/check-out indicator for accommodation is unclear
- Liked the feature to browse other itineraries
- Wants to be able to add items from browse itinerary to their own itinerary
For the reiteration, the following changes were made:
- Colours were reduced to create cleaner UI
- Payment page has been reduced from 3 to 2 pages to reduce effort and omit irrelevant information
- Adding payment has been refined so there is less information on the screen
- The check-in/check-out indicator has been modified to be clearer
- The copy in the browse itineraries page was edited to send a clearer message
- Add button was added to browse itineraries
For the usability testing of the reiterated prototype, some of the feedback was as below:
- Easy to use
- Liked the UI
- Liked the browse feature
- Payment screen is easy to understand
- Adding payments is easy to understand
Future Opportunities
There was a whole backlog of features that I have not yet incorporated into the prototype, such as:
- To create a platform where group members can collaborate their ideas, for example, voting on suggestions and adding comments to the itinerary
- Importing reservations to reduce effort in inputting
- Being able to tailor parameters for itinerary items so that the user will only see information which is relevant to them
- “Approval” signals by group members to reduce time wasted on non-committal opinions
- Built-in APIs for Google Maps to allow searching for logistics of how to get from point A to point B
Lessons Learnt
- As this is the first project I have completed by myself, there were various visual design aspects I had to learn as I am doing, including tools such as Adobe Illustrator
- There are a lot of constraints with using a prototype so I should concentrate on the actual functionality of the features instead of things like the login screen
- It might have been better to test the product in low fidelity to test the actual usability rather than when it’s in high fidelity and users are likely to be biased
- More emphasis should have been placed on information architecture since this was a platform to organise and display information, further research should be conducted into what information is actually put into the itineraries
