🗒 Project Overview: 63% of users use their smartphone when booking a trip. This includes finding fun things to do, researching destination choices, planning accommodations and inviting other to join. This reflects the preferred device being a mobile device and the amount of work that goes into a planning a trip. Ultimately, at the moment, each element is considered as an individual process as there is not one single platform which can assist with the different elements to planning and booking a complete trip, including activities.
🔁 Development Lifecycle: Design Thinking Methodology
👥 Team Members: Individual (1)
63% of users use their smartphone when booking. This includes finding fun things to do, researching destination choices, planning accommodations and inviting other to join. This reflects the amount of work that goes into a planning a trip and how each element is considered as an individual process as there is not one single platform which can assist with these different planning elements.
Research Aim: The goal of the research was to get a deep insight into people’s experiences, opinions and thoughts regarding travelling, to discover their likes, dislikes, pain points, motivations and goals when booking/planning their trip.
Research Methodology: Semi-structured Interviews
Key Rese0arch Questions: How often do you travel? How would you normally book or plan your travels? What are some of the travel apps and website you use the most? What do you like/dislike about them? What is your biggest frustration when it comes to planning or booking your travels?
Particiapnts:There were 5 participants within this study, with two participant groups: over 30’s and under 30’s.
We synthesised the findings from the interviews by categorising the participant’s responses into categories. We recognised that most of the categories highlighted different functionalities and needs for the users.
We further empathised with the user by creating an empathy map based on the responses synthesised within the affinity diagram. This allowed us to establish their expectations, emotions, lifestyle and how these can integrate to develop a usable solution.
Given all the data gathered from the users, we created Susan, our user persona. This allowed us to define and identify our target users and how Tripee could be incorporated within their tripe booking/planning habits. Having a user persona, allowed us to establish a user insight statement, problem statement and value propositions, focusing on Susan.
Susan - who loves to on holiday with family, works and takes care of her children. Specifically, she needs assistance with planning her travels because she also wants to relax without the stress of full parental responsibly.
Susan, a part-time working mother of 2, needs to plan and book a family holiday including activities, however, she finds this to be a hassle. How might we make this experience as simple as possible to make this stress free?
Tripee, is developing a holiday planning and booking app to help users solve the problem of time-consuming and stressful planning and booking experiences.
We synthesised Susan and our other users like Susan’s pain points, needs, gains, jobs and product/services that are concerned with a solution such as Tripee.
Using the Value Proposition Matrix, Affinity Diagrams and Empathy Map, we created a feature prioritisation Matrix which synthesised the features that should be included within our solution. The matrix focused on complexity and impact to ensure the most usable end solution; this was essential within the ideate phase.
To further ideate, before prototyping began, we focused on ways in which these features could be implemented within a usable app. Therefore, we created a storyboard which reflects on how this solution could be integrated within a user story concerning users' real-life experiences when booking/planning a trip.
Based on the storyboard, a user journey map was created to reflect the emotions, opportunities, and goals that the user would have within their story/journey. This ensures an easy and enjoyable user experience from the moment they begin to use the solution. This gave both depth and functional direction to the ideation phase.
To start designing, we needed to establish how the features and functionalities that have been ideated would function and how the application would come together overall, therefore we created a system flowchart to show the way each functionality would work.
Based on the flowchart, we created wireframe sketches of the solution.
With the blueprint of the prototype (wireframe sketches), we began prototyping properly, starting with a lo-fi prototype. Creating a lo-fi prototype of the solution – Tripee, was ideal as this allowed the testing phase to focus on content and information architecture design, rather than design aesthetics.
We completed 5 sets of interviews with 5 different participants for some guerrilla testing. We categorised and created a table of these categorised responses to synthesis the in-depth data gathered from these testing interviews.
With the different categories and responses mentioned, we used the most common responses within a priority matrix, we did this by analysing the categorisations and responses from the transcripts.
Based on the responses and results of the Guerrilla testing, we iterated the prototype by implementing the higher priority changes.
With that, brought us the final product, which we completed as high-fidelity..
I wish I had more time for this project but given that this project was apart of an UX/UI Bootcamp, we had strict deadlines that I was determined to meet. Going hand in hand with more time, I think an extra iteration, with another evaluation could have been amazing, particularly concerning the UI design.
For future works, I think this application could have an itinerary feature to ensure that the user is aware of different activities and events on the day and their exact timings. As well as this, given that many users often have smart-watches, a watch compatible application to send notification concerning their trip might also be considered in the future.