Revolutionizing Group Travel: A Comprehensive Tool for Seamless and Stress-Free Trip Planning
Project Overview
Planning a group trip with friends often turns into a chaotic and stressful endeavor due to diverse travel styles, information overload, and difficulty reaching a consensus. Our project aims to revolutionize this process by creating a comprehensive and user-friendly trip-planning tool for group travelers and avid planners. This tool will facilitate collaborative planning, streamline itinerary management, and ensure seamless coordination, making group travel enjoyable and hassle-free.
Time
October - December 2023
Team
Jennifer Widjaja (Product and UI/UX Designer)
Venice Hartono (UI/UX Design)
PJ Sethbakdi (Developers)
Eithan Jahja (Developers)
Time Charupaisankit (Developers)
Links
The Problem
Planning a group trip with other travelers gets quite complicated. We believe it is because
Difference in Traveling Style: Groups include both spontaneous travelers and detailed planners. Current solutions don't cater to both, making coordination difficult.
Information Overload: Sorting through vast amounts of travel information to find relevant recommendations is overwhelming.
Missed Opportunities: Avid planners may miss out on exciting experiences due to difficulties in discovering and adding new activities to their itineraries.
Difficulty in Reaching Consensus: Diverse preferences make it hard to agree on accommodations, transportation, and activities. Reaching a consensus is time-consuming and often frustrating.
Difficulty in Distributing Workload: One person often ends up handling most planning tasks, leading to burnout and an uneven workload.
Difficulty in Consolidating Information: Gathering and managing essential trip details is challenging, leading to a lack of structure and transparency in travel plans.
Due to these assumptions, we believe that our target audience consists of:
Group Travelers: This includes friends, families, or any groups of travelers who plan trips together. They often face challenges in coordinating diverse preferences, managing trip details, and reaching a consensus on activities, accommodations, and transportation.
Avid Planners: Individuals who thoroughly enjoy planning trips and prefer a detailed approach to itinerary management. They seek tools that help them stay organized, discover new activities, and ensure all essential trip details are consolidated in one place.
Spontaneous Travelers: Individuals who prefer a more flexible and spontaneous approach to travel. They appreciate tools that allow for quick decision-making, adaptability to changing plans, and the ability to add activities on the go without extensive pre-planning.
Confirmation
To validate whether our identified user problems and target audience assumptions were accurate, we conducted a contextual inquiry. This process involved interviewing potential users to gain deeper insights into their travel planning behaviors, challenges, and needs. Following the interviews, we utilized the affinity diagramming process to organize and synthesize the collected data, revealing common themes and patterns.
From our interviews with Martina and Anatta, it is clear that our initial ideas, target user population, and problem statement are validated. Both Martina and Anatta represent the diversity within the target user population. Martina prefers a more detailed and planned approach to travel, often traveling with her family, while Anatta leans towards spontaneity, especially when traveling alone. Yet, both interviewees have a need for a platform that accommodates a wide range of planning preferences within a group. Both interviewees rely on various tools and platforms for trip planning, highlighting the fragmentation in the current travel planning landscape, where users need to switch between different tools to organize their trips effectively. Anatta also emphasizes the importance of trust in personal recommendations from people who have been to the destination rather than trusting online websites. Both interviewees mentioned the need for adaptability when plans change, whether due to closures or unexpected circumstances. Ultimately, there is a clear need for a collaborative trip planning platform that caters to the diverse needs of group travelers and is user-friendly and adaptable, streamlining the travel planning process while accommodating different planning styles.
Storyboard Development
Following the completion of our contextual inquiry and the synthesis of our findings using affinity diagramming, we developed a storyboard that outlines user interactions with our app. This specific storyboard was selected because it directly addresses the core user challenges we aim to resolve
Missed Opportunities: It enables users to discover and seamlessly add new activities to their itineraries.
Difficulty in Reaching Consensus: The storyboard includes tools that facilitate decision-making and foster agreement among group members.
Difficulty in Consolidating Information: It centralizes all trip plans and essential details into a single, easily accessible location.
Difficulty in Distributing Workload: It allows for the clear delegation of tasks, ensuring an equitable distribution of trip planning responsibilities among group members.
This storyboard was chosen based on its potential to effectively tackle these identified user problems, enhancing the overall trip planning experience by addressing key pain points and improving collaboration among users.
Before creating any mockups, we conducted a comparative analysis to evaluate existing travel planning tools and identify gaps in the market. This step was essential to understand what features our app should have to solve the existing user issues with current apps. By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current solutions, we aim to build on what works well while addressing the shortcomings, ensuring our app offers unique value and effectively meets the needs of group travelers and avid planners.
Competitve Analysis
Insights
Based on what we have learned so far (user problems, target audience, and competitive analysis), we created a low-fidelity mockup of our app.
Using our low-fidelity mockup, we conducted a second round of user interviews where we observed how users interacted with the app. We wanted to see which buttons they clicked on and how they navigated through the interface. This process provided valuable insights into user behavior and preferences, helping us understand their thought processes and gather their opinions on the design.
Using the insights from our second-round interviews, we started iterating on our mid-fidelity mockup.
Additionally, to see if there is anything else missing in our mid-fidelity mockups, we conducted several evaluation activities to refine our design based on user feedback. These activities were crucial for identifying and addressing usability issues, ensuring that our app effectively meets the needs and preferences of our target users.
Evaluation Activity 1: Information Requirement
Purpose:
Currently, our ranking cards only display the name of the place, its location, and an image. We want to determine if this information is sufficient for people, especially those unfamiliar with the area, to make decisions on where to go. To test this, we set up an evaluation activity where we presented random people with these cards. This allowed us to observe their decision-making process and gather insights on whether additional information is needed.
Evaluation Activity 2: Prototype testing interaction
Purpose:
This evaluation was conducted to understand how users navigate through the mid-fidelity mockup, identify specific usability issues they encounter, and gather detailed insights on whether the overall design effectively addresses problems such as difficulty in reaching consensus, managing information overload, and coordinating group activities.
Solution
Finally, taking everything that we have learned from our user interviews, competitive analysis, we present you Trek: a comprehensive and user-friendly trip-planning tool for group travelers and avid planners
