My roles:
UX Researchers: To understand user experience of travelers who perform online information gathering, I conducted contextual interviews and surveys. I also created affinity maps, storyboards, usability tests, empathy maps and stake holder maps to analyze user data and their journey.
UX Designer: I designed the user flow for our platform and created low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes for our app.
Executive Summary Statement
Research Insights
The needs we identified are validated by potential users through various research methods. Users indicated that practical issues like spending habits are top concerns in selecting travel partners. In addition, preferences like trip schedule flexibility and intensity are some items important yet hard to be openly discussed or confirmed before the trip. It is also to our surprise that a substantial amount of people sacrifice their preference and compromise to their friends to avoid conflicts caused by trip planning or scheduling.
Our solution
TripUs is a trip planning app that combines different users' traveling preferences into one traveling plan using ranking algorithms. We also resolve user’s information overload by providing users recommendation on popular activities and plans for their reference.
Information Overload happens when a person is exposed to excessive quantity of information about a certain issue. The inundation of data burdens their effective thinking and impedes their decision-making process, and has become a main characteristic of modern life.
Information Overload can burden people's effective thinking and impedes their decision-making process. It frequently happens during trip planning and can lead to disagreements and conflicts. Conflict avoidance is typical when people try to resolve a disagreement, potentially creating more problems in the upcoming trip.
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We used Stakeholder Map to identify who is involve in trip planning and their interactions. Then we made Empathy Maps for different trip planners to understand their decision making process. We also include Affinity Diagram to summarize the challenges of trip planning by forming clusters and relations of our interview interpretation notes.
