Case Study - Smart Travel Planner App

Mobile Designer

UX Designer

Product Designer

Adobe Illustrator

Figma

Overview 🔍

Scope

An app that offers convenient group travel planning to make the process easier and more enjoyable, even when traveling with solo or even for large groups.

About this project

VACAY focuses on supporting solo & group travel planning, helping people exchange information, and updating trip schedules more effectively, suitable for many traveler to achieve their vacation dreams.

My Role

Conduct market research, user review, competitive research

Define User Persona and User Flow

Brand Identity, UI Design, and UX Design

Problem

Pre-pandemic, only 14% of travelers were going solo, but by mid-2021 that number had almost doubled to 23%.

–– travel trend by condorferries

In recent years, self-planned tours have become increasingly popular, and their popularity has doubled compared to before the pandemic. These tours offer several advantages, including the ability to choose your destination and schedule, manage your travel budget more effectively, and explore the local area freely.

However, planning a self-guided tour for a large group can be complicated and time-consuming. To ensure everyone has a comfortable and enjoyable experience, a comprehensive and user-friendly application is necessary.

Goal

Design mobile application that helps users plan and manage their travel itineraries in an efficient and enjoyable manner.

Research

Focus Area

In my user research, I aimed to address the following concerns:

Understand how users plan solo or group travel and their behavior during this process.

Identify which app features are essential for travel planning and gather user feedback on their experiences with these features.

Evaluate how users utilize group travel planning tools and identify any issues or challenges they may encounter.

In order to gain a comprehensive and truthful understanding of the issues that people are dealing with, I carry out user research through two methods:

A. Market Research (survey by condorferries)

B. User Interview

C. User Research Feedback Review

A. Market Research

I conducted some quantitative research and here are the findings-

In 2022, 74% of people go solo as they want to see the world and don't want to wait for others.

63% of people want to do what they want when they want.

73% want to travel independently vs the other want to travel on a group tour.

86% of lone travellers are aged 35 years.

84% of all lone travellers are women.

12% of 20-24 year old’s have been on a holiday by themselves.

90% of them use mobile phones to plan a trip

–– survey by condorferries

B. User Interview

I conducted an interview with 3 participants who have different user profiles, including students, office workers and housewives over 30 years old. The aim was to determine the essential products and features people use for planning solo or group travel.

Pre-interview biases/assumptions:

People find it difficult if they have to schedule travel plans, because they don't get information or recomendations.

People want more travel recommendations from different places/platform (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, web, reviews)

What is verified:

People want to get lots of recommendations from places closest to them by including reviews without taking up a lot of their time searching on search websites or social media.

What was refuted:

Scheduling can be challenging for people, not because of the absence of suggested itineraries, but due to other factors such as

other factor

Too many different opinions, which makes it challenging to vote.

Differences in each person's budget to make travel plans.

Spending a lot of time looking for recommendations, makes people lazy to make a plan.

People are less able to sort and choose destinations that are friendly and suitable for them to visit.

C. User Research Feedback Review

See complaints/comments given by users who use similar applications through certain channels (Google Play Review, Blog Articel etc.)

feedback review

I tried to mapping in several groups according to the pattern:

mapping bad and good value

I've 3 point of main problem in the crucial level:

from review app problem

Pain Point

From there, I can draw some pain points users might encounter.

pain point

User Persona

To better understand the needs of different user groups, creating personas can be helpful. Through user research surveys, I categorize individuals into three main groups based on their lifestyle and psychology, also known as psychographic segmentation.

Group-Planned

Self-Planned

persona 1

persona 2

Ideation - Finalizing Features

Based on the pain points I've listed I decided to select and sort all the features for the application. Below listed are the final features of the app.

Improvement/Idea

Information Architechture

Created an information architecture to get a better understanding of how each feature will help and also to get an organized view of the app. It also helped us in creating user flow and wireframes.

Information architecture

Creating user flows

keeping in mind the existing pain points and making an appropriate user flow with eliminating as many pain points as possible.

user flow

Brand & Logo

logo design process

Final Design

After completing all the wireframes I started with the visual design. the biggest challenge here is to make the app user-friendly, clean, and simple to use.