Tripability
Project Description
Coming up with a satisfactory itinerary has always been one of the most challenging parts of trip planning. For this research project, our goal is to understand what are the problems that are making this difficult and to propose design solutions to address these pain points. As a cross-disciplinary project, in addition to being the head designer on the team, I also took up leadership roles to organize, divide, and hand in our assignments very often. Further responsibilities include: team meeting organization, data analysis, and the debrief interview results with my teammates.
Role
UX Designer
HCI Researcher
Collaborators
Maggie Collier
Sunniva Liu
Timeline
Spring 2022
6 weeks
Problem Space
In preliminary studies with people who have planned travel, we found that many often go over budget because of unanticipated in-trip expenses, such as the cost of activities and dining. Additionally, budgeting features are not commonly integrated into existing tools that people use to plan travel and are limited in capabilities when present.
"How might we help users make more accurate travel budgets?"
A Community Based Budgeting App
We aim to provide more informed estimates about the less predictable expenses involved in travel–the costs of activities and dining in the destination city for our target audience of college students. Our goal is to design a tool which would help users compare pricing to stay on budget better, and would be able to integrate with other existing applications to put all the information in one place.
Research
In order to fully understand the problem space and our target audience we utilized a series of HCI research techniques to collect user data and later to validate, and test design proposals.
One example of the method we used is the Think-Aloud Protocol. Our task for Think-Aloud was to ask participants to screen share on Zoom and show how they would plan travel for fun to New York City on a given college budget for 5-7 days. Our participants were recruited based on our target audience for the research: college students with limited budgets for trip planning.
We conducted a total of 8 interviews which then we used to create our Affinity Diagram.
Data Analysis
Based on the data collected we were able to summarize our findings into both user pain points and insights.
Ideation
Our team then embarked on the journey to try out a range of creative activities to come up with ideas worth exploring. These activities allowed my team to validate or make edits to the design choices we made before moving on to creating the last prototype of the app.
By the end of these activities, we were able to settle on a system map for our app.
Prototyping
After the end of our reasearch project I decided to take on the challenge of desigining a set of UIs for our app, Tripability.
App Highlight
Our solution to the research is Tripability, a mobile application designed to create a smooth and effortless trip-planning experience. We aim to make budget-friendly travel more of our primary concern when it comes to this tool. Tripability solves the problem as it allows for the maximum flexibility for its users, both with respect to their budget and time management, by integrating data gathered from existing websites that compile and compare travel information through the use of result-generating algorithms and other planning tools.
