Project Overview
The Problem
Planning a trip itinerary is a complex and time-consuming task. It requires choosing the appropriate activities and scheduling time while taking into consideration opening hours, travel time, locations and price.
The Solution
Creating an efficient and personalized travel planning platform to help travellers make an itinerary while integrating personal preferences, activity location and scheduling. The platform will serve different functionalities on mobile and desktop.
My Role
User Research
How people plan their trips today
In order to help users improve the way they plan their trips, I first wanted to learn how they currently plan and organize their trips. I conducted surveys and interviews to better understand how people travel and discover their pains and needs. I focused on all the different platforms travellers currently use and determine the weaknesses and strengths of each one.
״I have to manually copy all the information I find on various websites into an external file and use it to manage my schedule and budget. This is very inconvenient and time-consuming״
Noam, 57
Conclusions
47% of travellers use more than one platform to plan their trip. Most of them use a combination of a calendar, a notebook and a map - each one serves a different functionality.
Calendars allow travellers to maintain chronological order of the trip's schedule and plan the activities according to specific hours and dates.
Notebooks allow for free-flowing and intuitive planning.
Maps help travellers locate their activities and connect them with other places in the vicinity in order to save time.
Pain Points
- Missing out on activities
- Wasting time during the trip
- Forgetting things
- Depending on cell phone battery
- Planning a disorganized itinerary on multiple platforms
User Needs
- Access to their planner during the trip
- Relevant recommendations
- Pinning locations on a map
- Effective and convenient planning
- Adding personal notes
- Sharing with fellow travellers
Competitor Analysis
I studied the existing products on the market, specifically those that my survey respondents use. I realized that most of them focus either on activity recommendations or schedule planning, often leaving out personalization. Also, most products specialize in only one aspect of traveling, which causes travelers to piece together a trip from different platforms, which is time consuming and frustrating.
Persona
The target audience is very diverse. While they all love traveling, they approach trip planning differently. I created personas based on my research to better understand different users.
Solution
Based on user research, people often plan trips on desktops and use mobile devices while they travel. Therefore, there is a need for the platform to serve both functionalities.
The desktop platform will focus on learning the user's preferences and planning the itinerary. It will make suggestions based on user interests and provide easy-to-use personalisation tools. The mobile platform will have an on-going use during the trip and will focus on the ready-made itinerary while allowing users to add or remove activities with the advantage of live-location.
Desktop
Onboarding Process
92% of users said that they choose activities according to recommendations of friends or bloggers. It is important for them to receive a recommendation from someone like-minded or who is familiar with their preferences. Therefore, the platform must provide maximum personalisation when suggesting activities.
The goal of the onboarding process is to provide the users with a selection of activity suggestions that is highly relevant to them. At first, the user defines the style of the trip and then selects different areas of interest. Lastly, the user will choose activities to save in the bucket list.
Main screen 6up - The Planning Board
My biggest challenge in this project was finding the right balance between the most important planning components: Calendar, Map and Activities.
Wireframes
The idea of the site is simple: users choose activities from their personal bucket list and drag them to the calendar.
Mobile
When designing the mobile app, two significant challenges arose: Comfortably adapting the itinerary to a smaller format and focusing on the advantages of live-location.
Rough Layout Sketching
Wireframes and flow
Final Design
When moving from wireframes to design, the 3-activity layout was changed to 2 due to visual overload. I designed the category icons and focused on the hierarchies on the activity card.
I chose blue and pink as leading colors to create a light and fun atmosphere and I designed icons for the different categories.
Icon Design & Categories
Design Inspiration
The visual inspiration came from Instagram, the ultimate travel visuals app and from clean architectural buildings. I decided to use a gradient to represent the easy going and fluidity of travel. I needed a neutral color to keep the color scheme of the app balanced and suitable as a task management platform. After many testing and color exploring, I chose blue and pink as leading colors to represent both the task-oriented side and the fun-experimental side of Triplan.
This project was created during my User Experience studies, which focused on research and UX methodologies.
UI design for mobile is currently in process and will be updated soon.
