Clever Trip: UX Case study for trip planning

Problem statement —

Design a trip planner app to plan your group travels effectively

Context

Planning a trip with a group of friends or family members has never been easy. Too many choices and opinions, conflicting ideas and lack of communication makes the whole process complicated and cumbersome

My task

Design a trip planner app which is a one-stop solution to plan group travels in the most organized way. This app should aim at helping users make decisions faster, discuss and collaborate better and make the whole process fun and enjoyable.

Disclaimer

This problem statement was from Chethan KVS also known as Design Pilot in the design world. Well if you are a designer you probably know him. He has been posting problem statements on Instagram. If you are a newbie designer and looking for some good problem statements to work on, you can check those. This problem statement is one of them.

Instagram handle — https://www.instagram.com/design_pilot/

This app is a trip planning app, not a booking app. Since the booking part is already a solved problem with apps like trip advisor and more, I wanted to build a niche product that solves the problem of planning and makes planning efficient.

Problem Breakdown

• Too many choices and opinions
• Conflicting ideas
• Lack of communication

What do I want my users to achieve?

• Effective ways to help users track
• Manage Information for the trip
• Help to make faster decisions about trip’s budget, duration, places to visit, etc.
• Organized planning.

Research

Before designing anything I did some desktop research on travel planning. Read articles and watched YouTube videos to understand more about group travel planning. Found some similar apps on the google play store to understand the pain points of the user.

Read a few answers on Quora about their group traveling and travel stories.

Gave me a major FOMO. Man need to plan a trip with my friends very soon.

Similar product research

• Trip advisor — best for research (Redirect to a particular website)
• Google Maps — Not planning but to see the tourist spots, photos, and reviews
• Trip it — schedule all the itinerary like flight updates. It has a bad UI
• Wander log — Organizing necessary information.

There are no apps that fulfill all the needs, which forced users to use google docs or excel sheet. After doing my desktop research, I got an idea and had a goal that what do I want to achieve by the end of the user research.

What do I want to achieve from the user survey?

• I want to know how did you decide to pick a date to go for a trip with your friend
• I want to know how did you decide which place to go.
• I want to know how to do your research about things to do/visit in that place
• I want to know how do you decide the budget
• How do you explore the place?
• Do you book cabs and bikes after reaching the spots or advanced booking?
• I want to know what are things you carry.

So I made a small survey and posted it on discord servers and WhatsApp groups. Through which I was able to get 15 Participants. The survey had a mix of qualitative and quantitative answers, between the age group of 18–24.

User survey

Selection criteria for selecting a place to go

• 92% of users don’t know where should they go on a trip. Deciding where to go is a big problem for them.
• 88% of users like going to places which is pocket friendly and more things to do/ visit.

Selection criteria for selecting activities to do -

• 84% of the users select activities that fit their budget and popular activities.
• 61% of the users decide to go the activities when everyone agrees on doing this.
• On spot decision also happens.

How does the user decide the budget?

• By the amount of money saved — 70%.
• According to the daily expense and then decide an amount — 30%.

Backpacking?

• 92% of the user keep essential things organized while traveling like flight or train tickets, stay details, license, ID cards, etc.
• Most of the people forget to bring the everyday used stuff like toothbrush, tower, etc.

After getting the insights, I identified what is the goal my users want to achieve. So here is a list of goals.

Identifying the user goals

• Help them to make better decisions about how to select a trip, what are the best places to go for a trip.
• What fits my budget?
• Show me something free to do.
• Booking details mentioned.
• Keep all the documents in an organized location
• Make an easy way of an itinerary
• Easy compare of places to find out what suits your budget, time, and other preferences
• Lack of communication

Before jumping to the cool stuff, here is the journey map. Trip planning has a lot of phases.

We all can admit, trip planning is not a joke. There is a reason why your Goa trip is always canceled. From creating “WhatsppWhatsApp to “My parents won’t allow” ruins your plans.

User Journey map — How does the planning goes for a trip

• Conference call of friends
• When to go (Date/month)
• Where to go (Everyone has their own opinion)
• Discussion about what were are going to do there
• Necessary itinerary
• Budget discussion
• Packing
• Trip starts

Also used these touchpoints, to identify how can our product fit in their life, and get motivated to use Clever Trip.

So yeah here’s the best part, Cool looking at screens, problems, and the solutions I have worked on.

All the iterations of the screens

Onboarding

In the onboarding section, I’m showing the product offerings with minimal text and an illustration to give a visual representation of the feature. I have used “Tap” functionality like Instagram stories, Easy to go back and forth. (It was a personal choice)

To decide the order of the features in the onboarding part, I wrote down all the features on paper and gave it a ranking from 1 to 5.

I applied the UX law of Serial Position Effect — Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series and decided to go with the most important features at the start and the end.

• If they are beginner users, they will get a good understanding of the product.
• If they are an intermediate user of clever trip, they can directly sign in, Without going through all the screens.

Also tried by hand on UX copy, Instead of using only sign up, I have used — I’m new, sign up for better communication and less confusion.

Login and sign up screens

Home page — This is the first screen that the user sees after signing up.

The problems faced by users

• People who don’t know where to go on a trip.
• People who want to take leaves and go on a trip
• Would be better if we could balance both work and travel.
• People who want to travel off beats places that are not commercialized.
• Travel according to the season and find the best places

Solution

• Can’t decide where to go, we got your back. Randomly suggests a location for the user
• A small weekend trip can help you, here are the best and the nearest travel destination for you
• Workcation spots to balance between work and travel.
• Suggesting the best offbeat places to explore
• Explore the best according to the season

Deciding a place where to go is not an issue, that is a small thing. But what to do over there and how to cover all the popular and tourist places in minimum time and minimum efforts makes your travel better. What’s the point if the user goes on a trip and visits only a few popular places and returns back home.

Deciding place and things to do.

Scenario 1 —

Jeevan decides to go on a group trip so he made a WhatsApp group with his 3 other friends and told them. “Guys lets go to Goa”.

Assuming they all agree, here are the bigger questions to answer.

1. What would be the budget,
2. what are we going to do there, how to go.
3. Is it the right season.
4. Will the amount will be sufficient.

Spending too much time on research and budgeting will kill the excitement of going on a trip. And researching is a tiring process. Clever trip save your precious time and effort to give you all the important information

Solution

• Different people plan trips differently, They have their budget according to that. Here is a realistic budget according to your needs. Whether it is luxury travel or mid-range or budget.
• Let’s see what can we do here, hmm we have a lot of options. Explore them
• Okay so your main problem — money is solved, but how do I reach it, and what is the best time to visit. If you are planning in advanced
• See how the locals explore the place, witness the best and less crowded places in Goa. (It is a travel article to provide a good understanding of the place from the locals)

Scenario 2 —

Jeevan and his friends are okay with the trip location and the budget, but they don’t know what to do next.

Problem

What are the things they can do there, so here are some. Google websites will take a long time and they have to use multiple websites, blogs, youtube videos, and whatnot.

Solution

• I have shown the important data of the travel spot like the name, location, entry details, and cost, These are the main information that the user requires when deciding the spots
• To make a better decision I have also given tags and ratings like best in town.
• More details about the place like timing, cost
• When is it more crowded, when is the best time, you can decide for yourself
• Additional information about, what they are providing

Planning the trip in a snap

This is where the user can plan their trip and add their dates of travel and select all things to do, places to visit in a single place. They also have the option of sharing it with their friends. Friends who were shared and added to the list, they can add new places or remove them.

Else most of these things are discussed over WhatsApp which has a lot of messages, and if a new person enters the chat, it would be difficult for them to understand.

Scenario 3 -

Now that Jeevan and his friends have decided where to go, what are the things they want to do during their trip? Now its time to decide which place should we visit on which. He sees that there are a lot of places these guys have selected now it’s a huge task to select where to go first, where to next, in which order, what are the best routes….

If they organize all the places very well then they can get the maximum out of it in the minimum period. And started to organize it very well in google Sheets.

Huff, that’s a lot of stuff they need to figure out. Guess what, they are thinking to hire a tour guide who can get them their way or drop some of the places and visit only the famous ones.

Solution —

So to remove all the burden I came up with the solution of a map, Here are all the locations you have decided to go to. Now you can select all places and group them according to an area, and cover all these places in a minimum amount of time.

Working of the route selection —

Other screens

Clever Trip is forthcoming (willing to give extra and useful information)

We all know how important are travel hacks and being safe during traveling, so I have used quirky messages in the notifications to make them aware.

My learning -

• This was a very interesting problem statement where I got to learn about travel planning and a lot more.
• If I want had to add any new features then I would have added some kind of delight factor to make it more interactive.
• Add a feature like a wrap-up by the end of the year, here are a few places you have traveled.

And that’s a wrap, and yeah don’t forget to give 50 claps. Just press the clap icon. That’s it.

Adios Amigos. Signing off...