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Define
Design
Prototype & Testing
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The Travelyst

A Social Travel Recommendations Platform

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Role

Lead Product Designer

Timeline

3 weeks

Tools

Figma, Whimsical, Maze

Scope of Work

UX Research, Ideation, User Flows, Low-Fidelity Wireframes, Style Kit, UI Components, User Testing, Mobile App Prototype
Overview
Creating a Social Hub for Trip Recommendations
When are we going to be able to travel again?

There finally may be light at the end of the tunnel. According to a recent survey by Scott's Cheap Flights of over 5800 members, 84% of consumers are planning to travel internationally and 93% are planning to travel domestically in 2021. I worked with a client and her business partner to create The Travelyst, a socially-powered hub of trip recommendations that connects users’ interests and preferences with trips from friends and similar travelers.

As a social platform, there were 2 sides of the experience to solve for:
  • Users and User-generated Content: Getting enough users to share content on the platform in order to make the platform valuable
  • Curated Discoverability: Curating relevant travel content to users and organizing trip information in a compelling, functional way
For the timeline of 3 weeks, the goal of the project was to create a mobile app prototype focusing on Curated Discoverability that users will find valuable for discovering travel recommendations and planning a trip.
Problem
Travel recommendations are overwhelming and generic.
  • There is too much irrelevant information to sift through from too many sources.
  • Recommendations are not personalized and do not match individuals’ unique travel needs or interests.
  • There is low trust, relevance, and legitimacy in incentivized online reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare, and other platforms.
Design Question

How might we help people easily discover travel recommendations that are relevant to their needs, preferences and interests? 

UX Research
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Failed Travel Startups
Yes, we know that travel is an extremely popular and saturated space, albeit quite fragmented. Knowing that there is a graveyard of travel startups, we looked into past and existing competitors to create a clear proposition of why this product would succeed and avoid the pitfalls of failed travel startups.

Competitors have limited scalability or focus purely on functional planning.

Validating the Opportunity
The clients had already done market research and conducted a survey to validate market opportunity for this app, so I dug into primary research to validate travelers’ assumptions and get more insight into how we could solve the problem.

My goals for conducting user interviews were to uncover:
  • How people travel, how they research and plan for a trip and what could be improved from this process
  • How people feel about sharing & receiving trip recommendations from friends and similar travelers
  • What types of trip preferences people have and what they care about when doing research for a destination or trip
I conducted 5 interviews with people that enjoyed traveling and have traveled both internationally and domestically within the last two years.
Primary Research Findings

It’s difficult to plan around location, time & availability, and budget.

Feature Considerations
  • Integrating Google Maps and pins so that users can plan trips and activities around location
  • Including information around time & availability in location details
  • Curated lists of activities by neighborhoods, i.e. "Top Travelyst Restaurants in Shoreditch"

Travelers have to spend a lot of time filtering through information to find off the beaten path things/hidden gems.

Feature Considerations
  • Can this be Premium content that users pay for?
  • This is a selling point for user acquisition
  • Include this as a prompt for users uploading travel content, use "Hidden Gems" as a tag or an activity for discoverability

They want to go to main cultural attraction "must-do's" and often plan their itineraries around those activities.

Feature Considerations
  • Prompt users to provide tips on "Must-Do's" and "What to Skip" - cultural attractions that are worth it and avoid tourist traps
  • Allow users to easily discover what to do/not to do

People want travel recs from others with similar traveling styles; spontaneous travelers travel very differently than meticulous planners.

Feature Considerations
  • Incorporate travel styles as tags - part of a Travelyst's travel profile and personality
Market Research

Consumers trust friends, social media, and other personalized sources most.

79% of Millennials took friends’ advice on destinations and booked based on those recommendations

84% of Millennials an Gen Z say they trust recommendations from friends & family.

50% of Millennials and 52% of Gen Zers say they trust influencers. 

45% of Millennials and 37% of Gen Z travelers are very or extremely likely to book a flight after receiving a personalized notification

"I think it's fun to find those hidden gems or off the beaten path things. Usually if you Google, your top search results are probably not those things."
- Research Interviewee #2
Define

Refining Discoverability

One of the key insights I learned through the research process is that discoverability is a preference in and of itself.

Users are generally open-minded when deciding what destinations to go to, but when doing travel research they often already have a destination in mind or an event to go to. They also want to discover travel recommendations based on different factors depending on the scenario.
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I used the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Framework to break down different ways a user would want to discover travel content.
When I want to go to X destination,
I want to see what other travelers did at that destination
So I can plan or decide what I want to do when I'm there.
When I'm planning to go on a trip,
I want to ask my friends and/or similar travelers for recommendations
So I can decide what to do on the trip from a trusted source.
or
When I'm looking for inspiration for where to go,
I want to see content that's relevant to me
So I can easily plan my next trip without having to think of where to go or what to do.
When I want to go somewhere based on my preferences and interests,
I want to find travel recommendations from people who travel like me
So I can be confident that I'll enjoy the trip.

Prioritizing Features

The goal for creating this MVP was to build features that would balance user needs with the goals of the clients, who wanted to first collect a robust database of user-generated trip recommendations.
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I used a feature priority matrix to ensure that the clients and I were aligned on how to build the initial prototype before doing so; however, I replaced "effort/cost of implementation" with business value to determine which features were critical for meeting the needs of both users and the business, since I wasn’t sure what level of effort/cost was required for certain features.
While I initially found profile tagging to be of less value to the user, the clients wanted this to be part of the MVP as it would be critical to create network effects and accelerate user acquisition.

The clients also felt that linking to users' itineraries wasn't a priority since this was more itinerary and planning-focused.

Building user flows based on travel intentions

Using the JTBD framework for discoverability, I created a user flow that would allow travelers to explore and discover content differently based on those Jobs, as well as think about how they would use the content to plan for trips.
Design
Variations of Exploring Travel Content

Playing with Homepage Discovery

With the different JTBD in mind from my user flow, I played with different variations of the homepage to see which option would best meet the needs of all Jobs, particularly with the functionality and layout for discovering and filtering content.

Less Exclusive, More Approachable

Although branding wasn’t a top priority for the first phase of building the app, the clients knew that they wanted to use DM Serif Display and Sofia Pro for their typography and gave me some broad guidelines for the brand to look and feel modern, approachable, and millennial-focused.

I strayed from using blue hues as many existing competitors used blue as their brand color and played with tones that were both feminine (sandy beige, misty peach) and masculine (dark forest green, burnt sienna), had a modern feel but didn't seem too sophisticated and exclusive.

Getting on the Same Page

To filter...or not to filter?

Before testing the prototype, I met with the clients to get their initial feedback and make any necessary revisions. Although the filter functionality and browsing by destinations was important to the user, the clients felt that removing this from the MVP would be best without enough user data to generate relevant results.

Creating Incentivizing Travel Profile Features

They also felt that the Profile Page needed to be more playful, so I took some inspiration from GoodReads to create fun ways to engage users with “badges” that could give users a quick snapshot of a traveler’s tastes and how well traveled they were. The ideas of different travel "badges" were discussed to incentivize users to upload their Trips (ie., achieving different status badges with 10, 20, 30 trips).
Profile Version 1
Profile Version 2
Prototyping & Testing
Understanding a Traveler's Mental Model

All that focus on discovery and then...

I conducted 5 moderated user tests and gathered 7 unmoderated tests to get some initial feedback on how users would want to use the app from a content and usability perspective.
The Biggest Takeaway

Travelers have difficulty separating discovery/exploring content with planning - they go hand in hand.

Unlike using other social sharing apps, travelers are unlikely to use this app to browse for fun; they would use it for the intent of desiring to go somewhere or to plan a trip. Recognizing this, I took common themes from users' feedback to iterate on areas that would better integrate exploration with planning.

Weaving a More Interactive Map Into the User Flow

50% of participants said that seeing the map higher on the page and where activities are located would better help them plan a trip.

Although I knew that users plan trips around location from interviews, I failed to incorporate that into the initial prototype. Because travelers rely heavily on geographical accessibility (proximity of activities, how to get from point A to point B, optimizing travel time), I made the map more integrated with each activity for travelers who plan itineraries ahead of time and those who want to find things to do in the moment if they're in the area.

People want the “unsexy” details

Travelers want more information on budget, location, lodging, transportation, and overall logistics.

Travelers are interested in how others planned their itineraries and want to get a sense of how many activities they are able to fit into one day, especially for multi-city or multi-country trips.

Instead of having users share specific itineraries that they have already spent time creating using other tools, the app will be able to sort their activities by date, using the timestamp on their uploaded photos.

42% of participants said they would want to see lodging recommendations. 50% of participants wanted more context on pricing and budgets.

Keeping the ease of the user upload process in mind, I included an option to add lodging and transportation details into the trip; however, lodging could also be added as an "Activity" and specific transportation details may be more relevant for certain activities.

Users also prioritize budget when traveling - this needs to be more prevalent and provide more context and specificity.
Travelers want more logistical context behind each activity. It would help them decide if they wanted to do that activity or how to plan for it - transportation, how much time was spent, helpful tips & tricks, reservations, best times to go, etc.

Although each Activity page allows users free range to describe it, guided prompts will allow users to share the most helpful information to other travelers in a digestible way.

Allow Travelers to Continue Exploration of Similar Trips and Activities

If users are interested in seeing other travelers' recommendations from similar trips and/or want to continue planning a trip, suggested content on a Trip or Location page will encourage more exploration and further help users plan trips.

From Design to Implementation

I thought it would be a good idea for the client and I to discuss what the implementation process would look like to build the app, how to ensure a smooth handoff process, and any tradeoffs the client might need to consider. What we learned gave us good insight into how we wanted to pursue the project moving forward and important factors for the client to take into consideration.

Specify as much detail as possible to minimize back and forth between designer and developer.

As a designer, this means creating as much clarity and consistency as possible in the design with a style guide, reusable UI components, annotations of when components should be used for what purpose, and either providing a high-fidelity prototype or a low-fidelity prototype with specific annotations for animations & microinteractions (easing curve, how many ms, fade/expand details, etc.) in the Figma file.

Tradeoffs to consider - how to build the app and time to implementation

Given that this app is based on user-generated content and would require a decent amount of work to build, there are a few factors the client needs to consider:
  • At a glance, the developer mentioned that a very rough timeline for building a working app for user-generated data would take a minimum of 2 months.
  • Depending on the client's ideal timing, a developer could build code quickly but make it harder to change, vs. spend more time building a more maintainable app with encapsulated components. Since this is an early-stage app concept I would imagine that the client would want to optimize for iteration.
  • The Profile Page has a lot of information - the Follow button would require back-end functionality, and filling in Bio information would require database & server-side fuctionality to save and update. Stripping down Profile Page features and content might be something to consider if the client is looking to ship the app quickly and test to acquire users and gain early feedback.
  • With limited time and resources, React Native would be the ideal way to build the app for optimizing cross-platform functionality.
Reflect
A Successful Start

Building a Product with a Two-Sided Marketplace is Tricky

I found success in this project by building a positive working relationship with the clients, delivering a prototype that matched their vision, and gaining initial feedback where 100% of testing participants found the app valuable for planning a trip. It was challenging, however, to make decisions on how to build the MVP and iterate to find the right balance of appeasing both users who use the app to discover content and those who create content.

What I Could Have Done Better

Some of the feedback I received from user testing validated the findings from my initial interviews, and I could have designed with more of those insights in mind. It was a challenge to balance the vision and direction from the clients with what users wanted...this will be a continuous journey as we aspire to build a compelling product.

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