Project Overview
The current landscape of group trip planning is complex. It involves juggling multiple platforms, leading to a fragmented and cumbersome experience. Coordination, accommodating various preferences, and effective collaboration become arduous tasks. Sharing numerous links across different platforms complicates discussions and decision-making. Lack of a dedicated platform hampers active participation from all team members.
The project introduces an integrative feature on the TripAdvisor app that enables multiple aspects of collaborative trip planning. This addition seamlessly integrates planning, communication, and access to relevant travel content into one comprehensive platform utilizing TripAdvisor’s existing content, increasing user retention across TripAdvisor pages and increasing user conversion rates for new users added to trip collaboration plans through an engaging trip onboarding flow.
The project introduces an integrative feature on the TripAdvisor app that enables multiple aspects of collaborative trip planning. This addition seamlessly integrates planning, communication, and access to relevant travel content into one comprehensive platform utilizing TripAdvisor’s existing content, increasing user retention across TripAdvisor pages and increasing user conversion rates for new users added to trip collaboration plans through an engaging trip onboarding flow.
Project Duration: 4 weeks
Team Members:
Shikha (me) (UX Designer)
Rafaela (UX Designer)
Team Members:
Shikha (me) (UX Designer)
Rafaela (UX Designer)
My Contribution: Market research, Contextual Inquiries, Research insights, Data Analysis, User Recruitment, Client communication, User interview, survey design, Designing recommendations, Hi-fidelity mockups, prototyping.
Tools used:
Figma, Figjam, Loom, Google Sheets
What are market gaps in the current trip planning landscape?
Through detailed competitive benchmarking, we realized that users preferred high collaborative features and high user-generated content for a trip-planning app. TripAdvisor, offers value-centered user and expert content across destinations, flights, hotels, activities with direct booking options, but lacks a collaborative group planning feature to directly utilize the existing data.
We aim to shift TripAdvisor's market positioning to be High collaborative and High user-generative content.
What focused pain-points do users feel while they group trip plan?
We conducted in-depth 30-40 min interviews with 6 participants, and conducted contextual inquiries of them using trip apps they normally use.
We also studied detailed past itineraries of the participants composed in multiple apps to come to 4 major trip planning stages, what they encompass, and pain points faced, as quoted from interviews.
Strategizing how user pain points can be made better
We understood the mental models of users while going through different trip planning stages and collated major insights to integrate the same in the feature, and composed a persona according to our research.
How can we design an integration that leverages TripAdvisor's existing affordances...
and also make trip planning more exciting and fun?
For the 4 stages of planning identified in our research, and TripAdvisor's existing trip planning flow, we re-strategised the main tabs to be Discover, Guidebook (instead of the current 'Saves'), Chat and Itinerary (adding more needed affordances to the current itinerary).
We added a trip onboarding flow that takes in preferences of each trip member and generates location catered to all the team members. This enables users to finalize a location in a more stream-lined and convenient manner while also enhancing the Destination planning experience.
The recommendations change as all members input their preferences. All collaborators can select a Yes or a No to agree or disagree for a location. The progress bar moves in accordance to the votes.
Users can filter out locations preferences. They can visually see how the group feels towards locations, hence enabling faster decisions that most importantly, keep in mind each individual preference.
The current 'Saves' on TripAdvisor has been renamed to Guidebook keeping the basic functionality of 'hearting' a location/ activity that saves it to a trip.
Here, to integrate collaborative-ness we have re-designed the Card to use the same mental model of the previous flow and enable users to agree or disagree to activities added to Guidebook.
This helps users to come to decisions faster, with all information at hand, at one location.
How do we make the integration to benefit both the business and the users?
How do we minimize excessive talk for finding the best locations?
The Chat feature works in collaboration with the Guidebook as it allows users to directly reference saved activities for each trip on the Chat with a #.
It also integrates 'Advisor' - a TripAdvisor AI chatbot that allows you to ask questions to it on the Chat, and all team members can read the answer.
"What is the best rated restaurant for deep-dish pizza in Chicago?" Advisor answers the same for all members to see and provides direct TripAdvisor page links for user reviews and booking.
Using the existing TripAdvisor Itinerary page and UI consistent, we integrated a more visual itinerary that allows multiple use cases that are necessary for maintaining a detailed itinerary as per the research.
We also connected the Itinerary to direct booking, minimizing the clicks to do so and maintaining all bookings on the Itinerary for easier reference while the users are on the trip, for all users to access the bookings easily.
What we wish to do further...
How can we make the Itinerary experience better when users are on the trip?
What quick widgets/ notifications can TripAdvisor provide to make the on-trip experience better?
What quick widgets/ notifications can TripAdvisor provide to make the on-trip experience better?
