Roundtrip

A mobile app to make group travel planning a fun and collaborative experience

Role

I was the sole UX designer and researcher, which included:

User research
Ideation
Personas
User stories
Wireframing process
Usability testing
Prototyping
UI design and branding

Duration

July 2022 - January 2023

Overview

Thinking back to my memories of traveling with friends, I recall singing songs in the car, getting some food to eat, and checking out cool events or places around the area. But most of the time, I remember thinking about how stressed out I was to get the trip planned in the first place! I was always the one responsible for planning out the trip, making sure it was within everyone’s budgets, etc. Roundtrip was my approach to creating a fun and collaborative group travel planning experience.

Challenge

When traveling with a group, there are a multitude of factors that can lead to frustration:

Making decisions for others (where to stay, where to visit, what to eat, etc.),
Conflicting ideas,
Finding the activities that would accommodate everyone

I wanted to make the decision-making and planning process less stressful for everyone in the group, while organizing the trip in one platform.

Solution

Interactive prototype link here

Creating a trip

This kicks off the start of the planning process. Users can choose where they’re traveling, when they’ll travel, and where they’ll be staying. They can also opt to decide at a later time.

Inviting people to a group trip

Planners can invite people to their group trip and view the plans. They can choose to invite through an email or a shareable link.

Roles can also be assigned to a person or group of people, whether that be as another planner or a normal travel buddy.

Voting through polls

The polls feature was created to help with the decision-making process. Users can go back and edit their votes, and also see a poll’s results.

Research

What makes up a “perfect” trip?

I asked this question as I began my research on this challenge. Lauren Sloss from The New York Times wrote about the key aspects of group travel in her article — namely, understanding the group dynamic and having shared apps and information play a huge part in the “success” of a trip. I also found a study in the Journal of Travel Research that showed the decision-making process was multifaceted, but some decisions were prioritized higher over others.

To get more insight into the group travel planning process, I conducted 5 remote interviews with people who had experiences traveling with a group in the last few years (I took into account lack of travel during the COVID-19 pandemic). As I gathered notes over the discussions with my participants, I saw some commonalities in their experiences.

“It’s a little difficult when everything’s on me… I like input from other people”

“Usually people will contribute to activities they are really interested in. I usually ask people to look up things to see if there’s anything that really catches their eye [...] but usually in the trips that I’m involved in, everybody just kinda just relies on me to do most of the logistical planning”

“Somebody has to be the decision maker but if you’re also trying to be considerate, it can feel very exhausting.”

“Even within a place you’re traveling to, people have disagreements on things they wanna do, or the important things to do given wherever you are.”

“...Even if you make suggestions, nobody’s responding right, so then you don’t know sometimes if you have to make the executive call and make a decision for everybody, or if you should wait until everybody chimes in.”

The insights I gathered from our discussions revealed:

The planning responsibilities were usually in the hands of one person
When the group doesn’t actively participate in making decisions or suggestions, this again leaves the main planner to figure out what best fits everyone’s preferences
It was impossible to equally share the responsibilities of planning within a group

Synthesizing the research

After gathering all my notes from the user interviews, I created an affinity map to help me group more commonalities between the different participants.

Affinity map cluster (leading the plans topic)

Affinity map cluster (decision-making topic)

In total, I ended up with around 14 clusters. Some of these included how plans are made, group dynamics, and collaboration (or lack of) within the group.

To help me further understand my users’ pain points and experiences, I created two empathy maps, which led me to create two main personas that led my design process.

Empathy Map 1 - Julie's persona — Empathy Map 1 -> Julie's persona

Empathy Map 2 - Nick's Persona — Empathy Map 2 -> Nick's Persona

Redefining the problem

Travel should be a fun, low-stress experience, and the planning leading up to it should feel the same way. It’s also important to involve others in decision-making, but requiring others’ involvement could seem burdensome for the people who are more lax around making plans. With these insights, this led me to define two problem statements:

How might we lessen the stress load on planners?

How might we encourage others to provide input in decision-making and suggestions?

Ideation

Because travel has so many facets to it, I wanted to consider the essential user flows or red-routes that get travel planning started in the first place. The basic planning steps were high priority, in addition to having an effective communication channel for the whole group to use.

Initial Findings, Sketches and Wireframes

I originally created some sketches and did some usability testing with 6 people to gain some quick feedback about the experience. I quickly realized that some of my tasks were worded ambiguously, so it confused the users on what to complete. I did however get some useful feedback, which included:

Adding back buttons for navigation
More screens for user to move around the app freely
Having more obvious ways to invite people to a group

Using this feedback, I later created more high-fidelity mockups for my main user flows/red-routes.

Usability Testing

After creating the high-fidelity mocks, I did a round of usability testing and quickly realized that the phrasing and order of certain tasks led people to interact with the application that I didn’t expect.

I then made some changes to the script and went through a second round of testing with a few more people, which later confirmed to me that phrasing really does matter in the testing process, and that you should get some feedback on the tasks/scenarios before starting the testing process to eliminate wasted time.

Learnings

Roundtrip started out as a project that I had big aspirations for, however as this was an MVP there were some parts that I wish I could have gone better:

Too much time spent on ideation - I originally had a lot of ideas in terms of what features would be beneficial and how the flows would turn out. However I realized after spending a lot of time coming up with those ideas that this was going to burn myself out if I wanted to pack my MVP with so many of these features to work on. This also made me realize I needed to focus on the users and resolving their pain points, and not what I wanted.
Getting feedback from others - since this was my first project, I wasn’t quite sure whether the concept and my designs of it made sense to people. I relied heavily on my mentor’s feedback which helped in some ways, but I wish I could have had other sets of eyes to help me out before I put it in front of users.
Consider different branding - I was very focused on having accessible colors and fonts, however this did not coincide with the original branding I had in mind. Striking a balance between accessibility and aesthetics is something I want to keep in mind for future designs.