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Tripism

Enriching travel experience for leisure tourists with less effort

OVERVIEW

My co-worker Zoe and I designed Tripism, which is a product that aims to enrich travel experience for the emerging younger generation of tourists. Through individualized exploring, thoughtful notification, flexible planning, and editing schedules, Tripism offers users a more flexible way to deal with changes on their trips. 

TEAM

Yuqing Chen

Zoe Ji

WHAT I DID

User Interview â€‹

Competitive Analysis 

Persona Creating

Journey Mapping

Prototyping

UX/UI Design

DATE

Jun 2017 - Oct 2017

Opportunity

Opportunity

Leisure tourism is a trending behavior among the younger generation. Such tourists spend time planning their trips to maximize enjoyment. However, my friends and I agreed planning for trips can be time-consuming and we struggled to collect information about tourist attractions when creating a plan.

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Therefore, my co-worker Zoe and I started to learn more about tourists' travel-plan behaviors to help tourists reduce stress when it comes to traveling.

User Research

User Research

We asked tourists to talk about their general experience of traveling. Specifically, we asked them to make note of the pain points they faced along the way. We interviewed 8 leisure tourists to get findings and insights into their unique and diverse experiences.

Many kinds of unexpected events happen in travel. Here are a few examples.
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Changes are inevitable in travel

We gained a more well-rounded understanding of the entire travel process with the help of an affinity diagram (←click to view it ). From interviewing our users, we mapped unexpected events in a 2 by 2 diagram. It helped us clarify why and when they change plans in travel.

Here are some changes mapped above:

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What we learned
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Regardless of the preparation level, travel is full of unexpected events.

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Planning is learning for being flexible and dealing with changes. Saving time in planning cannot saving time on the road.

Some other findings

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Everybody makes some sort of plan before taking a trip to have a better experience

People actively change their schedules to enrich their experience or passively change schedules to deal with emergencies

Almost all changes can be classified into three types: preventable, unforeseeable or caused by flexibility

People want to gain control of their trips, but struggle with changing plans when they have to do so

All participants tried to maximize their experiences by being relaxed as well as enjoying more activities during their trips

Besides, from competitive analysis, we found that

Even though all kinds of trip support products exist, people still have issues dealing with emergencies because these products focus more on trip planning.

Reframing
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Reframing the Problem

Empowering tourists on the road, not making plans for them

The sweet spot to tackle the problem is empowering tourists to flexibly respond to changes while they are on the road instead of helping them plan effectively and totally avoid changes.

Our design goal is empowering travelers to quickly and comfortably deal with changes

The analysis above helped us know what we could do to maximize the travel experience. So our solution aims to

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Give them freedom when they are planning

    Let them collect detailed information about tourist attractions in their favorite way

    Allow them to create and edit plans anytime

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Support them before, during and after changing their plans, reducing the burden of possible changes on the road

    Provide information and choices instead of making decisions for them

    Provide support to avoid or deal with emergencies

    Help them efficiently adjust plan when they need to keep the efficiency of original plan and gain control of their trip.

    Support based on current situations and user preferences

We created personas reflecting the two main groups of tourists we targeted: strict planners and soft planners. They helped to inform and guide our design.

Soft planner persona

Strict planner persona

Ideation

Ideation

Knowing our direction after research, synthesis and analysis. We brainstormed and purposed many possible ideas and analyzed their plus, minors and interesting elements.

Our first round evaluation worksheet

Our second round evaluation worksheet

We quickly sketched to explore selected ideas and then determined which ones most interest potential users and gathered quick feedback from our interviewees. 

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Some page sketches

Validating & Iterating

Validating & Iterating

After evaluating various concepts, we built our first prototype to gather feedback about our solution.

Takeaways from the feedback
  • Achievement system disturbs tourists’ experiences in reality

  • Exploring and Notification are needed in various situations

  • More information related to adjusting plans is needed

We made changes based on feedback we collected and kept polishing our ideas.

Final outcome

Tourists can add places to their wish list and create a new trip whenever they want to.

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When creating a new trip, the destination can be chosen from the wish list or any other places. Trips can be created and edited whenever users want.

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When creating a new trip, the destination can be chosen from the wish list or any other places. Trips can be created and edited whenever users want.

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The list of tourists' schedules can be seen and edited. They can add or delete some scenic spots and reference the indicator of hours to determine how much they can spend on their new activity. they may spend on the current schedule.

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Tourists will get notifications before/when urgent situations occur, including weather updates, traffic jams and so on. They also receive other kinds of notifications based on their schedules.

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Reflection

Reflection

It was a complex and completed design process and an opportunity of cooperating with a partner. I reflected on and digested my takeaways from this project:

  • See a big picture when using any methods or model to analyze complicated information.

  • Explore possibilities and never commit to a certain solution too early.

  • Balance the tradeoffs. Optimize the experience under constraints. With time and resources constraints, designers often have to decide on what would be the most impactful problem to approach, which feature would be most value-adding to have.

  • Justifying design is the point. Reach an agreement instead of telling the right and wrong when they have different opinions.

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