GuideU

Designing a "no-thinking" travel plan experience

GuideU is a travel planning app designed to make trip planning effortless. It generates a full itinerary tailored to your time frame, location, and the type of recommended destination experience. It becomes to your mobile tour guide, facilitating a full experience before and during your trip.

Timeline
2022-Initial Concept
2024 -Iteration

Role
UX Designer
UX Researcher

Tool
Figma

Problem

"Travel planning is meant to be exciting, but people often struggle with finding good destinations, planning routes, and managing group preferences. It’s time-consuming and frustrating. "

I was so excited to visit Seattle for the first time, but planning my trip without local insight overwhelmed me. I came to spend hours making plans. Planning a trip becomes even harder when a travel buddy is fine with “anywhere.”

I struggled with finding places, fitting everything into three days, and navigating. This made me wonder: is there a travel tool that plans everything instantly, and all I have to do is adjust it and enjoy the trip without worrying too much?

The Challenge

From my experience, I know that planning a trip can be painful and inefficient. I used all sorts of tools to search destinations, map routes and sync up with my travel buddy. Though each of these tools solved some aspect of the process, none of them solved it fully and I was left with too many options, and all the repeated steps to solve.

I wanted to know if others had similar difficulties. So, to confirm this, I sent out 21 surveys and collected feedback.

The findings showed that many travelers face similar challenges:

(1) 43% of respondents spend too much time planning trips

(2) 34% have difficulty deciding where to go

(3) 34% lack personalized recommendations and 29% struggle to coordinate with travel companions.

Discovering User Painpoints

I wanted to explore user needs based on the challenges identified. To better understand travel planning behaviors, and identify pain points, and needs, I interviewed 2 participants chosen from a pool of 11 interviews.

Key Insights:

(1) Time-consuming process: the planning process requires substantial time as, one has to refer to various sources, compare options, and create plans manually.

(2) Decision-making conflict: difficulty in determining travel locations or if individual attractions are appealing, frequently questioning the accuracy of online materials.

(3) Coordination challenges: when traveling with one or more people, coordinating what would be best for everyone can be tricky, especially given that each may have a general, or even conflicting, idea in mind.

(4) Inefficient routes: it's frustrating when dealing with unreliable tools or transportation complexity.

User Persona

Based on insights shared from two user interviews, I built three user personas to showcase different types of travelers and their varying pain points, behaviors, and needs when it comes to travel planning.

User Journey Map

To better understand my audience, I conducted a user journey map to gather the sentiment associated with user actions, document pain points and opportunity areas. Doing so allowed me to map out the complete travel planning experience from start to finish, which revealed opportunities to create a simpler or more user-friendly journey.

Design Goals

My observations into the problems that travelers face when planning their trip and these insights led to the design goals. I conducted user interviews and a survey, analyzed existing apps and tools, and then found major pain points: wasting time searching for a destination, finding it difficult to create personalized plans, and coordinating trips with friends.

Three Goals:

(1) Make travel planning easier and automated

(2) Increase customization and adaptability

(3) Allow group planning to collaborate

Design Process

User Flow (Happy Path)

I create an annotated ideal view of the steps and actions users take to make decisions in the travel planning app. This is an essential process to reinforce what aim users are seeking while using the app: a collaborative, organized, and customized travel plan. The user flow predicts any possible action from the user and provides users with a smooth and easy experience.

Solution 01: One-Click Auto-Generated Itinerary

GuideU based on destination, travel dates/duration, and destination type. It instantly generates a complete and organized travel plan with a single tap on the “Plan for Me” button.

GuideU changes the planning process, pulling together a ready-to-go itinerary customized to the user’s preferences in one snap, saving valuable time and energy.

Solution 02: Personalized Travel Details and
Flexible Editing

GuideU advances personalization to the next level by allowing travelers to customize each steps in their travel plan.

GuideU lets users duplicate trip plans that has already been prepared for them, to their selected destination.

GuideU recommends transportations in order to think less while users can change according to their own interests or requirements. For instance, from switching to a car rental to a walking route, users have total control over their travel.

GuideU is designed to be intuitive to each user's preferences by providing the option to view places in a list format or in a map view.

If users have a “where-should-I-go” question. GuideU recommends places based on users’ preferences. Users can then add these suggestions to their trip plan with a click of add button. If users like or dislike recommendations then GuidU future suggestions to be even more personalized.

Optimize route button allows users to quickly update their plan to determine the fastest route of travel saving time and maintaining organization. GuideU promises that adding new places won’t throw the itinerary into disorder.

Want to keep the relevant information in one spot? GuideU allows users to input tickets and notes. It makes the planning experience more seamless and less work.

Solution 03: Group Editing Collaboration

Creator: the travel plan creator has complete access settings control, which means that he/she may assign permissions for invited travel buddies. GuideU makes group editing is more organized and easier to manage with optimized permission management.

Sub-creators: the creator chooses who has access to edit the travel plan. Sub-creators can easily check and edit plans just like the creator. Changes display who made them, and there’s a chatroom for all to stay connected and easily share updates.

Conclusion

1. What GuideU Offers?

It simplifies travel planning: It is a one-click plan generator.
Enables users to customize their plans while maintaining a seamless experience.
It enables travel partners to collaborate, thus saving time and limiting the back-and-forth dialogue.

2. How to Measure Success?

See how long users are taking and planning their travel arrangements.
From the designs, run usability tests to see what works and what needs iteration.

3. What's Next?

If I had more time, I would enhance internal group editing to create an even smoother collaboration experience for all the teams.