Project 2

VALUE PROPOSITION

Intinity allows for organization of bookings and itinerary creation amongst travelers and their friends & family. This app centralizes trip information in one spot for everyone to see.

WHEN

December 2023 - April 2024

RESEARCH METHODS

Secondary Research: 7 Articles
Primary Research: 5 Interviews

OVERVIEW

As the first capstone project in the UX/UI Bootcamp with Stony Brook University, I was tasked with picking a problem space and conducting and practicing skills relating to UX/UI Design & Research in conjunction with learning them as part of the curriculum. This project was done over 4 months with a focus in travel planning and itinerary building.

OVERVIEW

Problem Statement

Traveling can be one of the most exciting things to happen in a life but also one of the most stressful, to spend multiple hours, months in advance to plan and make decisions for yourself or potentially an even larger group of people and trying to stay organized between all of the information and bookings from the entire process. When it comes to planning a trip, planning for multiple people and the difficulty of staying organized are the biggest stressors for someone.

Solution

It was my goal to create a mobile app that would allow users to keep their trips and vacations organized in one central location, allowing them to add their bookings and create an itinerary right in the app for all of the activities they plan on doing while on their trip. You can also add your family and friends to each trip so that they too can view the itinerary and be in the know on decisions that are being made and aid in keeping larger groups of people on schedule and in the loop on trips.

Roles & Responsobilities

My role in this project was to create a design solution using every step of the UI/UX process from researching to data analysis and user visualization through persona creation, to sketching and wireframing all the way into prototyping in a high fidelity manner. Each time a skill was applied it was directly in line with the curriculum of the course and what was part of the current unit being taught. I was able to kick start this project and research off with a strong foundation of secondary research and interviews with travelers in order to truly understand the problems that exist for planning and be able to create something that has the potential to solve these problems.

DISCOVER & UNCOVER

Research Methods

Looking to get a start on the research of trip planning and itinerary building, I conducted secondary research with the goal of uncovering potential problems that could lead to design opportunities for my project.

Through multiple articles and historical data, some key takeaways from my research include:

-   Itinerary building and location decisions create stress
-   Planning a trip can be too time consuming
-   The fun of planning is in the dreaming aspect of it
-   Finances and agreement of guests play a role into stress
-   Customers settle or phone in the research to avoid the time consuming process
-   There is no one app that stands alone from the rest

Some key questions to further investigate:
-   Do travelers find themselves using multiple apps/sites per trip to stay organized?
-   What do current apps lack?
-   What aspects of planning create stress?
-   Do pressure points influence purchase decisions?
-   What stops someone from following through with a trip?

These initial findings allowed me to begin to build interview questions out to further probe and hone in on the specific questions surrounding these potential problems and hear first hand experiences with those who have traveled and felt the stress of planning and booking.

When it came time to conduct interviews, I found 5 participants to and broke my interviews down into 3 research questions:
1.   What aspects of booking and planning travel creates stress for individuals and families?
2.   Is staying organized difficult while planning trips?
3.   What aspects of booking and planning travel are fun?

Personas & Empathy Maps

To better visualize my users, 2 personas were created; Stephen Kendricks and Grace Redd. Each of them takes on one of the key takeaways and problems uncovered through my research.

Stephen is a 27 year old Media assistant who typically travels alone or only plans for himself and his motivator is to stay organized while planning a trip but his common pain points is lacking the ability to do so across multiple different apps and platforms and having different bookings in different locations to find
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Grace is a 37 year old Nurse and mother of 2 who travels with her extended family for vacations and is responsible for planning the trip. Her motivators are to keep everyone aware of decisions that are being made for the trip and a common behavior of hers is to create an itinerary to keep everyone on schedule. Her pain points however stem from having to keep everyone on schedule with the itinerary and keeping everyone updated on every decision that gets made for the group’s vacation.

Design Thinking

Brainstorming ideas and generating potential solutions for my design project lead me to 3 key ideas with 1 eventually being chosen as the idea to move forward with.

The idea is a connected itinerary creator that would allow users who are traveling individually or with others to organize their trips and information in a way that holds everything together in one place. They would have the option to “create a new trip” and begin adding accommodations to it listed and shown in a clean way. This includes adding travel, flights, hotel, accommodations, meals, activities, events, sites, reservations along with crucial information for the organization such as adding links so nothing gets lost, time and date to allow for the app to organize your information in chronological order, and who is attending. To allow this app to be useful for groups or families, you can create a profile and share your trip with others and “invite” them to join so that they can see all of the decisions being made on the trip and are aware of the schedule while on the trip. Making other members VIPs for the trip will get them permission to make changes as well.

Sketching

For a guerrilla usability test my goal was to test the flows of my app by having the participants complete specific tasks. Those tasks include creating a new trip, adding/inviting friends to your trip, adding 2 items to your trip's itinerary and editing a created item's time. All of these flows are relevant to my MVP and so the usability of the app to complete these tasks is important to the success and development. I was also looking to assess the information that users may want included to be viewed and added for items in the itinerary

The overall reception of my app and this test was positive. The participants understood clearly what the goal and purpose of this app was without having to be informed prior. They made comments about the usefulness of something like this. Some of the feedback in terms of information that may be useful to be displayed for the trip container includes a picture of the location, the name of the trip, the location, the dates, the added friends and the number of added items for that trip which is something I did not have prior. As for information for added items, the feedback was similar to the communication of adding images for the locations of added items to give a visual representation of specific items the user may be looking for.

The most important finding from my usability test that a majority of the participants had in common was the ability to add friends to their trip. In my prototype and sketches, the add friends feature is a part of a container that shows the trip details for one specific trip under “My Trips.” Icons for the added friends are found in the corner along with a “+” button to add more friends. It was found that this button was not clearly identifiable for the users. This was effective feedback because I am now reconsidering how to restructure the ability to add friends to be a part of your trip as well as the other side of things if you are the friend receiving an invite and what that will look like for the user.

Wireframing

Once the sketches were tested and ready for their next iteration, I began to up the fidelity of the UI into wireframes. This would make the UI more detailed for tests as well as show more text in the UI so the user can better understand what the goal of the app or specific screens is and have more attention on the call to action for each screen.

The screens I wire-framed were the key screens in the user flows again to be able to map out the interactions and flow of the screens and take you through a specific action the same way the user flow did but in a more detailed way with the visualization of the screens the user would be interacting with.

Personality

Itinity is looking to take away the stress and negative aspects of planning trips, we want you to look forward to traveling and let that dream trip become a reality. Itinity is sincere, building trust and positivity with its users while also building up that excitement so you can be imaginative about your destinations.

Attributes

Imaginative to visualize their trips and allow them to think further than they normally would when planning a trip and be creative
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‍Easy to ensure the user can intuitively pick up this app and know how to use it and understand how to complete their tasks
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‍Reliable to ensure that whenever the user wants to use it and complete a task or plan a trip that they can do so to accomplish their goal and trust that nothing will go wrong
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Positive to aim to make the process a more positive experience and enjoyable for users as compared to stressful

VALUE PROPOSITION

WHEN

RESEARCH METHODS

OVERVIEW

Prototype