Product Design

Designing a mobile app to reduce travel stress by streamlining user itinerary development and research

Team
Daniel Leung (Me!)
Role
Product Manager & Designer
Timeline
October 14th - 16th, 2022
(2 days)

Overview

Context
UX Scene hosted a 2-day designathon, challenging over 38 teams (300+ students) to design a solution to a prompt using the UX design thinking process. From problem discovery, research, problem definition, designing, and prototyping, the 48-hour project gave me the opportunity to practice product thinking, design thinking, and product pitching skills to design a creative solution.
A mobile app that reduces travel stress by streamlining user itinerary development and research.
Design Challenge
Solution
Out of 3 prompts presented at the designathon, I chose to take on the following challenge:
Design a mobile experience for travellers.

Process

Background Research
Statistics
Given the broad challenge of designing a mobile experience for travellers, I first wanted to empathize with a traveller and understand what inconveniences they experience. Upon research, I discovered an interesting phenomenon many travellers experience known as travel stress: the feeling of mental strain and pressure due to travelling which can cause a negative vacation experience.
  • Travel planning
  • Air travel experiences
  • Safety concerns
  • Unexpected events
  • Financial strain
  • Unrealistic expectations
I noticed that many of these stresses take place before travelling has even begun! Nearly 70% of those reasons are related to pre-travel stresses.
However, it wasn’t enough to get qualitative sentiments from travellers. I wanted to make sure that there is statistical evidence that support this idea that travel stress is a common occurrence amongst travellers. More specifically, I wanted to get data that pinpoints why users experience this stress and what it is attributed to.

After some further research I found the following data to support the causes of travel stress:
Problem Discovery
I wanted to narrow down some of these user sentiments. The research reveals that travel stress is induced by the need to find things to do, but finding it stressful to do so as a result of the overload of information available on the internet.
Travellers planning a vacation may have the following questions they want answered to plan their trip:
  • Where should I go?
  • What should I do?
  • Is it right for me
  • Will I enjoy it?
  • Is it affordable?
  • How long will the visit take?
  • Am I missing out?
The goal of travellers while they are planning is that they want to know what they are going to do during a vacation. Unfortunately, planning for it is difficult due to information overload. Also, travellers will plan itineraries and experience the paradox of choice where they are less satisfied with their itineraries because the quantity of choices they had to pick from.

Information overload while planning for trips not only contributes to travel stress, but it also makes travellers less satisfied with their plans. The worry that their itineraries will not make them happy causes a negative feedback loop which contributes to even more travel stress.
Empathize
I wanted to observe the steps I would take to research and develop my own itinerary, and upon doing so, it was evident why travellers would be incredibly overwhelmed during this process.
Define
With the problem space understood and its correlating effects on the users, it was now time to define the problem I wanted to solve with the mobile experience for travellers.
Problem Statement
Through the research, I observed that travel stress is induced by planning for a vacation and curating an itinerary. The challenge faced by users in this process is that the overload of information increases the travel stress experienced by users while reducing their level of satisfaction with their itineraries.
Solution Objective
The objective of this mobile experience is to reduce travel stress by ensuring travellers are satisfied with their travel itineraries. The solution should reduce information overload and ensure travellers are presented with key information as they are conducting their research.
Success Metrics
Itinerary satisfaction
Do users feel more satisfied with their trip itineraries?
Travel stress levels
Do users feel less travel stress?
Usability
Do users feel overloaded with information?
Do users feel like they are being provided with enough information?
Retention
Do users return to use the app to plan trips?
Ideation
Based on the research and problem discovery executed, the mobile app I came up with to reduce travel stress and enable travellers to feel more satisfied with their travel itineraries is an app called travelly.
Product
Travelly is a mobile app designed to alleviate the pressures of itinerary development by allowing travellers to curate itineraries catered to their specific interests. It ensures travellers are not overloaded with information as they are conducting research so they can create create travel plans they are happy with. Its features aim to reduce travel stress experienced by travellers in itinerary development.
Product Vision
Creating happiness in the travel itinerary.
Mission
Enable travellers to select travel activities that pertain to their interests in a quick, concise, and curated manner.
Give travellers a sense of satisfaction with their curated itineraries.
Reduce information overload to make travel planning stress-free.
MVP
The next step I took was to note down the most critical feature travelly must include in its first iteration to meet the product vision, mission statements, and solution objective. The core feature travelly offers is its activity grid, a grid of travel activities generated after the user selects their interests for a vacation. This grid is concise and easy to digest to reduce the information overload that would be experienced from searching on the open web. The user can add items from the grid to create their travel itinerary completely based on items they are interested in to filter out redundant and unwanted information.
User Persona
I defined a user persona so that I can have a representation of the type of user I would be building this application for.
Interfaces
I constructed a user journey map to gain a better understanding of the interfaces needed to meet the MVP. I defined the purpose of each interface and gave reasoning as to why it was necessary.
Home Screen
  • Provide access to list of previously created itineraries
  • Provide users the ability to create new itineraries
Itinerary Creation
  • Allow creation of itineraries
Interfaces
  • Itinerary name and logistics set-up
  • Interest selection
  • Interest prioritization
Activity Grid
  • Provide a visually concise representation of potential activities for itinerary curation
Activity Details
  • Provide the details of an activity
Design
The required interfaces helped narrow down the necessary components each interface would have and the design process was kickstarted from these requirements.
Lo/Mid-Fi
To start the designing of the app, I referred to the user journey and put myself into the perspective of the user. I began to layout screens based on the requirements defined previously to meet the MVP.
The mock-ups reinforced the user journey and exposed areas of consideration that could be reworked quickly before moving to the hi-fi including button layouts, feature designs, information architecture, etc.
Components & Styles
Before starting on the hi-fi prototype, I laid out a baseline of components and styles I could use throughout the design for consistency and quality.
Colours
I researched the current design landscape for travel companies. From altexsoft, the following infographic revealed that companies in this landscape use various bright colours. I felt that to stand out, using a darker tone would help the product differentiate itself from the others.

Using coolors, I generated a palette of darker blue tones along with a black and white colour for text and backgrounds on the mobile app.
Typography
I wanted to ensure consistency and visual hierarchy was maintained throughout the app. Referencing the typography guidelines laid out by the Material Design Guidelines, I created a typography system including headlines, subtitles, and body text to be used throughout the hi-fi prototype.
Components
From the lo-fi prototype, I observed that there were some key components used repetitively. For consistency and efficiency, I made a quick library of the core components I would need, including logos, buttons, and icons from the Material Design library.
Hi-Fi Prototype

Next Steps

Usability
Product Considerations
The next step I would like to take with it is to conduct a usability test. I want to gauge user sentiments towards the various design choices I made and see where I can make improvements.

I want to use the usability test to see if users can successfully complete the task intuitively and understand if they would use this product to plan for their trips again; why and why not?
In retrospect, there are many attributes to this app, in terms of development feasibility and usability, that I would like to address in future iterations.

Consideration

Comment

Where is the data for the activity details page coming from?
In the first iteration, research would have to be done to see how the app can scrape data from open sources to provide the most up to date data.

In future iterations, I would encourage more design work to be done on the app that enables travellers to leave reviews for others to see.
In having limited options, does that cause users to feel a sense of FOMO?
This is definitely a concern. The hope with travelly is that by curating an itinerary that is specific to the user, FOMO can be mitigated.

It is because of this concern that I felt it was necessary to include the refresh feature on the activity grid so users can refresh any item to get a wide variety of activities without being overloaded with information.
How does the generation of the activity grid work based on a prioritization system?
More research would have to be done to gauge what method is most feasible to implement. The hope is that there would be a queue of activities that can be seen upon the user hitting the refresh button.
Why would users choose to use travelly vs. other competitors like Trip Advisor?
One of travelly’s core values is that it reduces the information overload experienced when travellers are researching. The hope is that the app will give a stress-free yet informative experience to travellers planning vacations and trips without being overloaded with information.

Improvements

User Segmentation
User Interviews & Surveys
During the problem definition phase, something I did not do effectively was to segment the definition of a ‘traveller’. Upon completing the prototype, I realized that because this was a mobile experience, a use case with the product could have been smaller trips and vacations, not necessary international ones where lots of research is required. For instance, perhaps a quick weekend trip, or potentially even those who are travelling for business related reasons. I think if I was able to find a target market of users in more specificity, I would be able to design an itinerary development experience more specific to these needs and not just travellers in general.
Another design process element I should have elaborated more on is to leverage tools like user interviews and surveys as part of the problem discovery process. The research I conducted was secondary user research and although it was a helpful start, it would have been more effective to interview travellers first hand to get a better understanding of some other pain points they encountered while travelling. This may have led to a more creative problem space to focus on.

I also understand that given the time constraint and limited resources that this may not have been possible, but it is definitely something that would add value to the problem definition.
Flushing Out the User Flow
The user flow I created captured how the user would create an itinerary after prioritizing their interests, however, another key user flow I missed is how a user would return and edit a previously created itinerary. As with most planning, it is very rare that plans are perfect, and to reduce travel stress, it would be necessary to consider how itinerary revision operates.
Iterations
An element that limited my design creativity was the fact that I did not iterate on ideas, and instead, got fixated on one solution. In future product design sprints, I see a lot of value on iteration and finding different ways to reach the product.

Conclusion

Key Takeaways
  1. Prioritizing features and defining an MVP is dependent on the objective. It was interesting going through the thought exercise of developing a list of features that formulated the core of the product. It was especially challenging given the short time span, but it was a good exercise to think about release versions and what was necessary as a first iteration. Setting an objective to meet helped establish the necessary features to meet that objective.
  2. Lo-fi’s are important to create. As I defined the problem and thought about potential solutions, I found that prototyping a lo-fi created a low-risk environment to experiment with ideas and ensure that the user flow was fluent and intuitive. The lo-fi exposed flows I realized were not thought out and gave me the opportunity to correct them before they were passed on to the hi-fi. This takeaway is one I willapply to future product design tasks.
  3. Empathizing with a user through a user persona is a great way to visualize the flow of the product and help with problem discovery. I realized that spending the time to create a user persona proved to be of great assistance with creating a comprehensive flow to resolve the user’s pain point. It connected the product with a real human and enabled myself as the designer to put myself in their shoes. I think the persona I used in could have had more detail, but it has definitely opened my eyes to the importance of a user persona for great product design.

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