Wandermore

Travel App Design

July 2021 - September 2021

I have spent the last several years squeezing in as much travel and adventure as I could. A true “weekend warrior,” I love to see as much as I can over weekends and holidays. This often means a lot of planning and logistical organization to keep track of bookings, plans and reservations. After years of traveling, I also began a travel blog which has given me the chance to connect with many others and learn about their pain points when it comes to trip planning. When I set out to decide the topic for this project, I knew quickly that I wanted to focus on the topic of trip planning and create something useful for myself and many people that I interact with. I set out to tackle the problem of trip planning frustrations and design an organized solution to plan the logistics of travel.

Secondary Research

During the research process, the first step was to find out the pain points when it comes to travel planning. Secondary research was conducted using several travel trade publications and articles and several interesting trends in the travel space emerged.

During the research process, the first step was to find out the pain points when it comes to travel planning. Secondary Research was conducted using several travel trade publications and articles and several interesting trends in the travel space emerged. Here are some interesting takeaways from the secondary research:

Consumers are ready to start traveling again post-pandemic. According to a survey by the American Express 2021 Global Travel Trends Report, 87% of respondents say that having a trip booked boosts their happiness and 78% of respondents want to travel to relieve the stress of 2020.
Consumers are looking for lesser known destinations. According to the American Express Travel Trends Report, 69% of respondents are interested in lesser known destinations and 80% of people are willing to travel in the off season to avoid crowds.
Millennials feel burnt out from overworking and feel a sense of FOMO when they see their peers traveling and they cannot. According to Travel and Leisure, 23% of people feel burned out when their coworkers go on vacation and according to Travel Agent Central, 89% of people think that travel is stressful. Studies show that the most stressful part of travel is the planning stage.
An overwhelming amount of options leaves consumers to overpay. Startups like Smart Nomad are looking for ways to streamline the travel planning process and weave together all bookings.

Primary Research

After a range of secondary research, a survey was conducted that included questions on their travel preferences. From the survey responses, five users were interviewed who enjoyed traveling regularly. Valuable knowledge about travel planning pain points was gained from the interviews.

“Vacations should not feel like a job.” - Quote from an interviewee expressing his need for simple trip planning.

Bookings are disjointed. When asked where they store information for a trip, interviewees discussed having no clear place where they organized reservations and bookings. A couple of people described the struggle of searching through their emails to find the relevant booking information they needed.
Distrust in Generic Review Sites. People are wanting to escape the crowds and visit less crowded destinations in order to travel more responsibly and get off the beaten path. They trust word-of-mouth recommendations but aren’t sure how to find what they’re looking for online. They want personalized local recommendations without spending hours scouring the internet.

“I want a Google Flights but for the whole trip.” - Quote from an interviewee expressing his wish to have all of his travel bookings in one place

Creating the MVP

Based on the research and work so far, empathy maps and personas were created to represent the ideal users. Based on the personas, it was determined what to include in the first version of the app. For Elaina, local recommendations and a way to save the recommendations are most important. For Matt, clearly seeing costs and the simplicity of the app are most important.

MVP

The Solution

In order to solve the problem of disjointed bookings and the opportunity for more local recommendations, a travel planning app was created to connect travellers with local guides and allows the user to plan a complete trip from start to finish. The application is designed to be focused on usability first with an emphasis on consistency and efficiency. The app is meant to be a resource for both frequent travelers and for those who travel once a year.

Process

The simplified user flow is as follows. The user first needs to decide their destination. The app will suggest a personalized destination or the user can search and pick their own. Next, the app will take them through the step by step process of planning a trip. The process is meant to be flexible so the user can skip or save for later any step along the way. Finally, all trip plans are shown together and the user can continue to refer back and modify before and during their trip.

User Flow

Home Screen

Home Screen Ideations

In the first early sketch, the user was given a choice between how they would like to proceed. However, there was nothing that helped the user make their decision. As ideations continued, the design was adapted to give the user more control by giving them more options while also helping them make the decision with personalized suggestions.

When it was time for sketching, multiple sketches were created for the most important screens.It is important for the home screen of the app to show different states depending on where the user is at in the planning process. From the interviews, it was clear that some people would use this app with a destination in mind while others would use it to be inspired by new destinations they had not considered.

Home Screen Different States

Screen one and two are for users who have not used the app to plan any trips yet. The first screen prompts the user to take a personalized quiz so that the app can get to know their preferences. Screen two is used if the user does not want to take a quiz.
When the user has used the app for planning, their trips will show on the home screen, as shown on the third screen.

Trip Planning Screen

From the user interviews, it was gathered that it would be important to have a way to show all trip information on one page. Early ideations had icons at the top of the screen that would link to a separate page that showed bookings. It evolved to show all bookings on one page so that the user does not need to navigate as much.

Trip Screen Sketches

UI Design

The inspiration behind the UI of the app was based on calming travel photography that mostly focused on outdoor destinations and small towns. These are intentional to make the user feel as if they are traveling off the beaten path. The typography was chosen to be very readable and simple so that the travel photography would shine through as the focus.
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The app was laid out using an eight pixel grid. The eight pixel grid is a good standard because it scales well in different screen displays and is recommended by both Apple and Google. The numbers 4 and 8 are also easily multiplied and make it easy to stay consistent.

Design Evolution Based on User Feedback

Designs were tested among users several times throughout the design process. During each phase, around five people of various ages and genders tested the app and design decisions evolved based on their feedback and the ease of using the app.

Car Rental Flow

These design decisions were made with usability in mind:

Progress bar at the bottom - user can always go forward or back.
Three dots in the corner allow user to skip or add manually.
Car and planes - not as much info is needed. Boxes expand when they touch them.
Local recommendations to help the users make a decision and provide a service that other platforms do not.

An early high fidelity version of the app was tested among five new participants who were avid travelers.
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The most important takeaway from these first usability tests was to make the ‘local travel guide’ feature more obvious. Four out of five users didn’t notice it on the first screen. As a result, this button was updated to be a pop of color and to look like a clickable button.

Updates to Local Recommendations

After making several tweaks, the second version was tested on five more participants. The biggest learning from round two of testing was that the headers did not obviously show where the user was at in the planning process. In screen three, the titles were updated to better reflect what step the user was currently completing.

Learnings

The area of this project I felt most rushed on due to time constraints was the ideation phase. I wish I had spent more time on this area to get more creative with solution ideation.
The amount of screens that this user flow involved made the process complicated at times. I would have chosen a solution more simple to really focus if I were to do this again.