Reinventing Travel Planning for the Web

This project and its documentation is ongoing.

CLIENT BACKGROUND

TravelMustard: Plan your next trip, together!

TravelMustard's mission is to make group planning easier, more transparent, and fun. Their web-based planner allows you to invite your friends and family to plan your trip with you, and creates a itinerary that is visible to everyone.

At the time, TravelMustard was an early stage start-up with a functional prototype. They needed a designer to transform their prototype into a polished product that would be ready for launch.

 

THE PROBLEM

TravelMustard needed to launch quickly in order to achieve key growth metrics. However, its prototype was still rudimentary.

 

MY ROLE

I took charge of UX, UI and visual design to create a product that would be ready for launch.

Working in an agile environment with another designer, the developers, and the founder, I saw the product through several iterations. Based on user feedback and research findings, I ideated novel solutions for both web and mobile.

 

DISCOVERY

My first steps were to speak with internal stakeholders to learn as much as possible about our users. What deep user need are we solving for?

I constructed lean personas by triangulating data from three sources: my stakeholder interviews, the research already gathered by the team, and online ethnography from Facebook groups and travel forums.

Constructing personas at this stage allowed me to get to the core problem, and to highlight areas where further research was required. I would fill in these knowledge gaps as the project developed.

 

THE CORE PROBLEM

The lack of an efficient, centralised solution for planning and sharing the details of a group trip.

The current solutions over-burden the lead planner and create confusion and frustration for everyone involved. Having identified the core user need, I could start moving towards a solution.

 

HOW MIGHT WE...

Create a visually compelling and intuitive web experience that satisfies core user needs?

Based on my discovery work, I concluded that my high-level goals were:

  • To determine the core features of the product: which features really solve the problem for the user, and which are just "nice-to-haves"?

  • To optimise the interaction flows for these core features.

  • To translate the low-fidelity wireframes into polished, high-quality visuals, creating a consistent visual identity for the brand.
  • To ensure that my solution was functional across desktop and mobile.

These goals would evolve as the team worked together in Agile.

 

INTERACTION DESIGN

I conducted task analyses for each core feature and mapped out their interaction flows.

I started by focusing on the interactions for the core features of the platform. These features included:

  • Creating a trip
  • Creating an event
  • Editing event details and moving an event to another date
  • Inviting a friend to join the trip

To accomplish this, I conducted task analyses for each feature and mapped out each interaction flow. Based on these flows, I created mini-prototypes for each interaction, seeking feedback from the team.

 

VISUAL DESIGN

To make the itinerary items easily digestible, I organised them into cards.

This made the itinerary visual rather than text-based, and increased scannability and interaction affordances. Each card revealed further interaction options nestled inside.

 

PROTOTYPING

We moved through several rounds of internal validation. Eventually, we arrived at version one of the platform.

Version one was coded by our developer and shipped out. We were excited to find out what our users would think.

 

HOWEVER...

We didn't get the reviews we'd hoped for.

On the contrary, user testing revealed that our core interaction flows required too much manual input from the user. People were getting frustrated at having to repeat steps, and giving up.

There had to be an easier, more intuitive way to do things. We had to go back to the drawing board, and re-imagine a solution that would give the user greater flexibility.

 

USER INTERVIEWS

I decided to conduct more in-depth user research to validate core assumptions.

I wanted to ensure that the next iteration of our platform would address key user needs. To this end, I constructed a questionnaire and interviewed a small number of potential users about their most recent group travel experience.

Based on the data I gathered, I was able to create data-driven personas that filled in our previous knowledge gaps and gave us direction for the next iteration.

 

ITERATION

Armed with new data from my interviews, it was time to ideate.

Drawing on my research findings and our user testing results, I came up with multiple visual concepts for our new solution. I took advantage of our existing card design, and thought about visual layouts that would support the flexible arrangement of these cards.
 

I was inspired by the Kanban system and project management tools that were already utilising this system to achieve results.

 

THE SOLUTION

A flexible, drag-and-drop visual planner that responds to the evolving nature of trip planning.

You can try out TravelMustard here: http://www.travelmustard.com