Road trip planner app

How crowdsourcing improve the efficiency of road trip planning

Role: Lead Product Designer

Team: Me only (personal project)

Device: iOS

Tools: Figma

Planning a road trip can be time consuming. It can take days, weeks or even months to aggregate research from reviews, blogs and websites before finalizing a travel plan. I want to design how to improve this process.

The problem

It's too time consuming to plan a road trip.

The business goal

Activation, retention and to build up a trip library.

User goal

Easy planning, booking and have a great travel experience.

Not only struggle with planning, but also choosing destinations

"Where do I go?"

"Driving one way is too far, where do I stop?"

"How can I make sure I don't miss the scenic routes?"

"I am using way too many tools to plan."

Learning about the two user stories

Explorers

Stage #1

Not ready to plan

"I'm happy ending up anywhere, but need inspiration to decide where to go."

Planners

Stage #2

Ready to plan

"I have a general idea of where I want to go."

Exploring possible solutions

I jumped right into the possible solutions and drafted an end-to-end experience from exploring destinations, planning, using the app during travel to sharing their experience with others.

Translating my sketch into a user flow.

Hypothesis

A single platform road trip planner that
1). enables users to plan, book, and manage all parts of the trip, and
2). provides recommendations that fit user needs & preferences
would help users waste less time in road trip planning.

Clear Call To Action vs. too many icons

I really like Roadtripper's home screen that provides a clear Call To Action for users who are ready to plan and options of trip guide for users looking for ideas where to go. Overall, Roadtripper offers a very clean design. On the other hand, inRoute wasn't very intuitive. There are too many icons and no text to explain what they are.

Remix and improve solutions

After conducting lightning demos on competitors, I was inspired to sketch the following solutions...

Finalize the storyboard

Improving the sketches with a few more variations helped simplify the layout. The storyboard I decided on below which both explorers and planners will be able to start their user journey on the same screen.

I redefined the user flow with the updated storyboard.

Design the prototype

Start new trip

Collecting trip info from users

Modify / View

Modify the suggested plan

Save and share your travel plan

Start your trip

Feedback

I tested the solution with 5 people via zoom who have recently planned a road trip. This is some of the feedback I received from the participants.

I also received a wish list below from my participants.

A recommended checklist of items to bring
Spending tracker and cost splitting tool with their travel friends
Track their travel friends during the trip
Multiple route options

Conclusion

What didn't work?

Assume round trip
Making users follow a schedule during their vacation
Wrong timing in the process to ask for travel style decision
Making decision too early result in feeling missing out on new experiences
Travel style selections are too restrictive

What worked?

Learning other's experiences
Taking other's recommendations/advice
Sharing their own experiences
Collaborate with others in planning
Open to trying new things/experiences

Next steps

Learning about the users behavior is essential to suggesting a travel plan to them. Will look into data science to collect user data
Instead of asking what users like, will test if eliminating options would better help users to narrow down their travel options
Will test on design with more flexibility in the schedule in case last minute changes