Overview
“Go” is a travel based recommendations app that aims to alleviate the stress of planning a trip with friends. It employs an itinerary creation tool which creates a trip based on your criteria while allowing you to customize the itinerary jointly with friends.
Problem Statement
Planning a trip with friends has proven to be stressful and time consuming. People are seeking products that streamline and simplify the process to make for a much more pleasant and productive way to plan a trip with multiple participants.
Potential Solutions
Create a simplified experience that will enable people to quickly plan unique trips based on a set of preferences. People should be able to refine the trip recommendations through collaboration with friends invited to the experience.
Challenges
Creating a resource that eliminates the stress of planning a trip solo or with friends.
Allowing all trip goers (friends) to control and have a say in what the itinerary looks like.
Providing enough resources to build confidence in only needing this app to plan a trip.
People don’t know where to start when planning a trip sometimes.
Personas
When planning a trip you either travel alone or with other individuals. I created a persona that represent an individual who likes to travel with others.
Wireframes
There were over 200 unique wireframes created for this project. Creating this many wireframes helped me to quickly filter through ideas to see what would work well and be easy to navigate. They assisted in helping me identify the elements I needed to prioritize for the designed solution to be successful.
Challenge One & Four
The process of planning a trip can be a lengthy one with many steps and stumbles along the way. That stress is only magnified by the more individuals added. “Go” alleviates this by generating fully fleshed out trip itineraries in just four short steps.
Challenge Two
Once an itinerary has been generated, the user has the ability to share and invite friends to the upcoming trip. Friends who were invited are then able to share their opinions and preferences on the activities listed and make recommendations as to what additional activities they would like to add to the itinerary. Overall the user who created the trip has the most control over how the trip goes.
Challenge Three
I wanted to provide as much information as possible without overwhelming the user. To avoid this I utilized tabs to create a better information architecture. The tabs include:
Information about each location and activity
Information regarding different type of accommodations and flights
In depth overviews of generated trips through story mode format.
Takeaways
There are many travel based apps, websites, and products that all aim to make planning a trip easier. There are even some products that recruit an itinerary generator similar to the one used in this product. After completing a competitor analysis I realized that it would be difficult to differentiate this app from the others and make it appealing to users of those other products but I’ve learned if you can provide a better solution no matter the number of competitors, it’s worth the investigation and trial.
The process of turning a client’s app idea into a real, functioning prototype by using lean UX principles has given me a glimpse of the rigor necessary to produce a quality product solution.