Travel.U
A digital product for travelers to receive help with managing travel expenses.
Challenge
People love to travel. It ensures peace of mind and creates memories of a lifetime. While traveling to a new location may be exciting, prepping for the trip and having to organize after the trip can become a hassle. The challenge was how might I improve travel experiences through a mobile application?
Mind Mapping
The topic of travel is very broad and has many aspects to it. There are multitudes of different problems travelers could face. In order to narrow down the scope of the project, I created a mind map with 3 main segments of travel: before, during, and after.
User Research
After creating my mind map, I decided to learn more about the pain points travelers have for
their trips in addition to how they plan for their trips.
I conducted 12 interviews with travelers who recently traveled. The age range of the
interviewees was between 24-30 years old. I showed my mind map to my research targets and
asked them to identify their biggest pain point
and followed up with a few survey questions.
Affinity Mapping
From my research, there were 3 takeaways:
Travelers use a travel app to check their travel plans and additional information throughout the trip.
During the pre-travel stage, price, lodging, and food are the main concerns for travelers when planning a schedule.
Travelers find it difficult to keep track of the amount of money they used throughout the trip and split the cost evenly among their travel companion(s).
Drawing out the
problem
I saw a commonality with regard to pain points that my interviewees faced while traveling. Most of them preferred traveling with a companion and everyone seemed to have a hard time keeping track of their travel expenses. This helped me pinpoint my areas of opportunity.
Key Drivers
Through research, frustrations travelers experienced became evident. The ability to quickly track travel expenses was crucial to the success of the app. I based my designs to deliver upon the following objectives.
Objectives:
· Add a feature to allow tracking of expenditures
· Allow users to control payment and assign to selected individuals
· Create auto expense calculations
· Allow users to share results within their travel group
Competitive Analysis
With those frustrations in mind, I dove into the competitive landscape to see what sort of services were available in other travel apps. I selected a handful of competitors that were commonly used during travel and highlighted in our user interviews.
From the competitive analysis, I learned that none of the existing travel apps provided a service that helped users keep track of all the expenses throughout the travel.
User Persona
Style Guides
With a general prototype and map of the product, I moved into designing out the UI. I aimed for a bold and modern look to complement the energy and desire users feel while traveling.
User Flow
Usability Testing
From identifying the problems to the final prototype testing, users shared their inputs along the way and participated in reshaping the design. Their opinions were extremely helpful while I searched for solutions, tracing back as early as to the low-fi stage. The valuable feedback from the users offered glimpses of how people interact with my product and how I can improve the design to craft better a user experience.
What I Learned
Travel.U was such a fun learning experience. I learned how to empathize with users, understanding their needs, and the struggles they face when traveling. The interesting part in designing Travel.U was creating icons that were easily recognizable. I hope this app will encourage people to travel more comfortably.