TRAVELIST
TRAVELIST Simplifies the trip planning experience and helps you plan your trip with your friends.
TraveList helps you plan trips with your friend easily. TraveList is a new app that assists you and your friends with your travel plans - each friend can add places they want to visit and TraveList will help organize the itinerary and suggest more places nearby.
ROLE
UX Designer and researcher
RESEARCH TOOLS
Interviews
Usability tests
THE PROBLEM
People use various tools to prepare their travel itineraries with friends, which is complicated and disorganized.
THE SOLUTION
TRAVELIST is a one-stop shop for travel planning that helps you plan your trips with your friends easily.
THE PROCESS
RESEARCH - INTERVIEWS
I've been given the challenge of designing a consumer app that helps you save & remember places. I started with interviews to understand why people save places, their needs, and what's missing.
RESEARCH GOAL
The goal of the research is to understand why people save places. What are the use cases, needs, and pain points in the tools they are currently using?
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Why do users save places - what are the uses?
What type of information do people keep on each one of the places?
What are the things that are missing in the tool they're currently using?
METHODOLOGY
I conducted 15-20 minutes semi-structured interviews with five people. Participants were at the age of age 18-45 and keeping lists of places on different platforms.
Example of a question: Can you tell me about one of your most recent places you added to your list? How did you decide to add it? Can you describe the actions that you took to add it to your list?
FINDINGS
Type of Places Users Save
Users tend to save three types of places: places they visited and liked, places they want to visit (without a specific time frame), places they want to visit on an upcoming trip.
Users Create New Lists for Upcoming Trips
Users manage multiple lists and usually create dedicated lists for their upcoming trips. These lists include places, such as hikes, restaurants, museums, national parks, lakes, galleries, and stores. They add places they saw on social media, read about them, or got recommendations from friends.
Writing Notes About Each Place
Often users write a note about places they add to the maps. These notes include where they got the recommendation, tips and tricks (like free days at museums), and specific suggestions (like recommended dish in a restaurant).
Share Places and Lists with Friends
Users share lists or items from their list with friends. Users also create and manage lists with friends when planning a trip, although that can get complicated.
View Places as a List and on a Map
Users look at the places on a map but also want to see it as a list since it's easier to browse.
Texting with Friends
When planning trips with friends, people mainly use messaging apps to communicate.
SUMMERY
There’s a need for a tool that helps plan trips with friends simultaneously. Main features should include multiple contributors, map and list view, notes, and offline access.
CONTEXT SCENARIO
To better define the problem and use case, I've created a context scenario and designed a flow based on it.
Jane, Karen, and Emily are planning a three days trip to Lassen. They already booked a hotel and are now deciding where to travel in the area. They are super excited about this trip and want to get the most out of it, but they don’t have much time to meet and plan it together.
Jane creates a new map named ‘A trip to Lassen’, she shares it with her friends. Each one of the three starts adding places that they want to visit in the area. Each one of them can see the sites her friends added. When Karen saw Emily added ‘Devil’s Kitchen’ to the map, she commented she wants to visit there as well and added a note that they should wear comfortable walking shoes.
When they finished, each one wrote in the group chat, saying they’re done adding places, and Emily offers to arrange the itinerary by days. Emily decides it will be best to divide the days by geographic location. She looks at the map, chooses a bunch of nearby places, groups them together, names the group, and scheduled a date. Once done, she pings her friends and asks them to see if they’re okay with that. They approve the lists, and their calendar automatically updated with the itinerary information.
A day before the trip, all three got a notification reminding them to bring comfortable walking shoes to ‘Devils Kitchen.'
On the morning of the trip, they got a notification with the meetup time and location, and the three friends met at Emily's place. They got in the car, open the app, filter to see only the sites planned for today, click on their first destination, and easily navigated to the location.
They arrived at their first destination, and when they finished there they checked the itinerary again and navigated to the next destination. Although there was no reception, the app has an offline version of the map, and the friends can navigate to the next location.
FLOW AND SKETCHES
I've started with designing the flow and sketching the first draft of the screens.
Main Features:
Map and list view
Sharing options and permissions
Grouping places
Search and suggestions
Writing notes
Navigation
WIREFRAMES
Based on the sketches and the context scenario, I used Sketch to create LO-FI wireframes.
Search places and add them to the map:
Users can save notes and links, add time and priority to help create the itinerary.
Grouping places flow:
Users can group items to create itineraries or lists of places.
USABILITY TESTING
Before designing the screens, I wanted to test the flow and used the wireframes to perform usability testing.
RESEARCH GOALS
The research has two main goals. To observe how people interact with the app and to check if users understand the hierarchy of Map > Group > Place.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Are users able to create a map, a group, and a place?
Will users create a place or a map first?
Do users understand the difference between the search bar (search among my places) to add a new place?
Do people understand why and how to group places?
METHODOLOGY
I used the wireframes to create a prototype using InVision. I tested the app on four people who use lists (digital or analog) when planning their trips.
I asked participants to perform two tasks:
Pretend you're planning a trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park - create a map for this trip and add a location - Bumpass Hell.
After adding Bumpass Hell, you’ll see there are new places on your map that you didn't add, and that's okay. Pretend as if you added them and arrange your itinerary to contain all of these places on the first day of the trip.
Following these tasks, I asked the participants a few wrap-up questions.
FINDINGS
Search Bar & ‘Add Places’ Wasn’t Intuitive
The search bar was confusing - users clicked on it to search for new places (even inside a map), and expected to search for new places.
It was Difficult for Users to Group Places
One of the four users didn’t know how to create an itinerary (group places). Another user found it difficult, and it took around 3 minutes to understand how to do it.
Users Asked for Auto Grouping by Itinerary
Users said the primary purpose of grouping places would be to create the trip itinerary and wanted the app to do it for them (based on location).
Showing Driving Route and Time
Users wanted to see the driving route and time after setting time and date to places.
Tell Me More about Places
People want to see more information about hikes - the length of the route, walking time, and specialized equipment needed.
Navigating wasn’t Intuitive, but Easy to Remember
Getting back to the map by clicking on the map title took a few seconds. It wasn't easy to learn but was easy to remember.
SUMMERY
The flow was confusing for users, especially the grouping part. Initially, I wanted to give users the freedom to group places however they want, but it seems they prefer the app to group it for them.
The search was also obscure and it wasn't intuitive to users.
FINAL UX DESIGN
Since users felt the search bar was confusing, I changed it. I joined the search for saved places and new places into one search bar and changed the visualization in the search results. Users use the same search bar, and the distinction will appear in the search results.
One of the biggest issues found in the usability testing was that it was difficult to arrange the places into an itinerary (by grouping). I decided to automatically arrange places in a map into itineraries, either by the date and time users added or by GEO location. Users can edit the groups or delete them.
People wanted to get more information about the places. I’ve added more useful information about each one of the places and added categories in the search so users could explore new places.
The bottom navigation bar was changed.
NEXT STEPS
The design process for this project was different than what I'm used to. Usually, in interviews, I already have a general solution in mind, and I use the interviews to understand the user's needs and goals. This time, I used the interviews to find a solution, therefore, I feel that I didn't define the users' needs and goals well enough.
I would want to do another set of interviews to define the needs, goals better. Also, I listened to the 'ideate' podcast about travels, where they created a journey map and suggested that people would want to get travel recommendations from locals. I like to test this assumption and possibly add user-generated content to the app.