Main Objective

Make an app that simplifies the process of planning a trip to start atracting new users and improve the conversion rate to enter in the market.

Challenges

• Reduce the time users take to plan a trip.

• Adapt a trip according to the preferences or needs of each user and their level of experience making trips.

• Design an app with the most relevant and accurate information about a trip without resulting in information overload.

Responsibilities

• UX Researcher

• UX Designer

• UI Designer

My process

RESEARCH

Understand their mental models

The first part of the research consists of approaching people that plan their trips in order to understand their mental models.

I also read travel blogs to see all the recommendations experts have for beginners, so I could see what is important for them to keep in mind when traveling.

For this task, I talked with three people and saw 5 blogs of experts, the main ideas are in the post-its next to this text.

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RESEARCH

Competitive analysis

I wanted to know why planners are not so common when traveling is the hobby of so many people.

For this analysis, I experienced how other apps perform the task of planning a trip. I also looked for the comments of other users to see their reviews and made some discoveries:

• Most of them offer users a timeline that they can use to add places, but it's not accurate with the city users want to visit.

• None of the sites give weather information, things to pack, information for transport, or personalized suggestions.

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DEFINITION

Let’s create personas

For this phase, I used three techniques to organize all the information I had about users:

• A user-centered business canvas to gather all the vital business-related questions as well as information on the target users.

• Two empathy maps, since I want to work with extreme users.

• Two personas, Caring Jhoanna that is a beginner when planning tripsand likes to trip with her family; and Explorer David that does more than five trips a year alone.

IDEATION

Make the ideas flow

For the ideation session, I started making the content prototype to understand better the interaction between the user and the interface. I also made a user flow according to that.

• Login before starting is relevant so they can save their trips.

• Making two options in case they know where to travel or not means they have some freedom in the app.

• Showing information about places should be one of the most visible things so they can familiarize themselves with the place.

• The itinerary should also be flexible in case they don't like the suggestions the app gives them.

PROTOTYPING

Sketch, sketch and sketch

First, I sketched a low fidelity prototype according to the user flow that I made.

I started with the screen where users decide which place they want to visit or if they don’t know yet and I ended with a full itinerary screen.

Note: This is just the happy path of planning a trip, more functionalities could be included in the next steps of this project.

TESTING

Usability test

I made a test on Maze.com where 7 people participated. It was a great experience because I could see all the click areas and the misclicks besides all the answers to the questions I made in different missions.

I also had short interviews where people could express more about the app.

So one of the important comments was about the fonts I put at first since it was difficult for users to read the information. There was also another problem with the gray color. It was too soft for text to be readable, so users didn’t see important information.

FINAL RESULTS

Conclusions

After observing how users searched for travel information, I understood their mental models and found out that they waste a lot of time searching information on different resources, which was the challenge in this project.

For that reason, I made an app that reduces the time of users when searching for information and making an itinerary, but also I designed elements like checklists, reservations, and information displays that are more organized and accessible for users.

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