Case study: An app that helps you decide your travel destination and book trips

“A short piece on the trail of the thought processes that went behind solving the problem of finding a travel destination, for all kinds of travelers. “

This case study was done as a Capstone Project for the 10kdesigners Masterclass.

Back story 💭

😬 Please watch the video to know the back story and understand the problem space :

Now, there are two things that might happen with Bill -

🙄 He has to compromise with some of the preferences and go with the best option available

OR

😤 Eventually lose his patience and give up on the plan since he couldn’t find a place that fulfills all his preferences

Problem Statement 📌

The above scenario can also be shortly explained as :

To help travelers find places & trips that match the most with their preferences, by providing as narrowed-down suggestions as possible.

This app will help users not have to compromise with their preferences/factors and skip the tedious task of researching on the internet.

The app enables the users to :

Additionally, delivering personalized suggestions of places & trips to the users is the main product value here.

But how did I infer that this was a problem? 🧐

User Research 📚

I conducted small-scale research by :

• talking over a call with a few friends
• google form

who :

• travel frequently
• occasionally go on trips
• rarely get a chance to travel

A total of 34 people shared their experiences and the insights are :

🔷 more than half of them usually make their own decisions and face obstacles while doing so

🔷 they have a lot of preferences but find it difficult to find places that fulfill them

The above screenshots clearly mention the problems they face while making a decision

These are a few of the comments I discovered on ‘Travel blogs’, which indicate that people have a wide range of preferences while traveling, and it is a tedious process to find places and trips that fulfill them.

☝ Based on the above compelling evidence, I deduced that it is indeed a tiring process to search for places and trips that match every preference of the travelers.

✔️ So, if there was a way that could reduce users’ efforts and do this job for them, a salient amount of weight would be lifted off their shoulders, now isn’t it?

What are people currently doing?

Mental models 🧠

Competitive Analysis 📈

1️. Below are some of the existing travel apps and websites that provide two options for the users to apply their preferences :

• applying ‘Filters’ on trips after choosing a place
• providing multiple categories of trips after choosing a destination.

2️. Websites that have a ‘Quiz’ feature to help users find their perfect destination, by asking a few questions :

Quiz feature in existing travel websites — Competitive analysis

Pain points ⚠️

Although these products do provide a broad range of trips to choose from, none of them is solving the primary problem of helping the users to choose a DESTINATION — which is by and large the first step of planning a trip.

🔺 Filters are not helpful when :

• the users don’t know the destination/place
• showing all filters & categories at once might overwhelm the users

🔺 The quiz feature in the above websites are not much helpful, as :

• they have very limited questions/options to choose from
• questions are not well categorized
• some of them are recommending just one destination at the end

😉 So why not make this process of deciding a place and trips a tad fun for the users?

Ideation 💡

In order to solve the problem, three possible solutions were evaluated, based on the following metrics :

✔️ Based on the above evaluation, for a seamless User experience, using Quiz/Forms appeared to be the ideal solution!

Features and their Hierarchy

✔️ After finalising the solution — quiz feature, I worked out all the features to be included and their hierarchy,

✔️ These features were decided based on design patterns in existing tourism products.

☝ I used the MoSCoW framework, in order to prioritize all the features to be included in the app and establish their hierarchy.

Exploration of other features to be included in the app

Sitemap ⏬

Here is the overall flow of VacayMe.

IA of VacayMe

Subsequently, I designed the onboarding and signup/login screens.

Okay! So the base work is done. Now let’s completely focus on the solution I came up with for the core problem — the QUIZ!

Deep diving into the Quiz feature 🎯

Who are the users 👥

🔷 Hence, ‘users who don’t know where to go ‘ will be the most frequent users of the quiz feature.

🔷 According to the above research and analyzing the mental models of the users, the users can be broadly categorized into two categories :

This categorization helps :

🔷 to analyze what types of users would need recommendations and which users would use the search option

🔷 users to choose a region in the quiz

🔷 and in giving recommendations at the end, region-wise.

☝ For the problem statement, I have focussed on the users who :

• don’t know where to go
• have a preference for a continent
• have a preference for a country

since these are the users who would need recommendations.

The fourth user category is still our user, but the core problem isn’t their first use case ( as stated above ).

First step — Deciding the questions of the quiz

⚠️ It was very crucial to carefully pick the questions and not miss out on the common and important factors that travelers consider while planning. If the users do not find what they had expected or looking for, they might drop off in between.

🔷 From the mental models and the research conducted, it was evident that we could categorize travelers into four main groups at the top level since preferences/priorities change according to who you are traveling with.

Different Quiz categories

Accordingly, I started collecting data from different sources to make a list of priorities these different groups of users have :

• Read travel blogs — noted the comments of readers, and factors the travel bloggers recommended to consider
• Checked the various ‘filters’ and ‘categories of trips’ provided in apps
• Browsed websites that recommend what factors to consider while planning a trip :
  mindtravel, solotravelworld
• Checked the websites having a similar quiz feature ( as mentioned in the ‘competitive analysis’ section )
  explorersplace, yourtopplaces, insightvacations

Next step — Deciding the sequence of the questions

Figuring out a proper sequence of the questions to be asked, was highly important, as :

• A proper sequence gives a direction to the users to think and choose
• Makes the choices more intuitive, which in turn helps the users to choose

I decided the sequence by :

• considering the mental models
• data from the research

Hereafter, I will explain all the further sections by taking an example of the quiz for ‘SOLO’ travelers.

Following is the entire quiz for SOLO travelers.

Quiz for Solo category

Visual Designs for the Quiz 🎨

Visual iterations I did for each of the quiz questions 🥲

Visual iterations for the Quiz questions

Final Designs 💫

Home screen for 1st-time users

Quiz questions

Quiz question — Selecting a region/place

Quiz question — Selecting a time to travel

A few rejected iterations for the ‘Weather question’. These were rejected due to the inconsistency of the design with the other screens.

Visual explorations for Weather qs

Visual exploration for Weather qs

Final Design :

Final design of Weather qs

Quiz question — Selecting a budget

Quiz questions — Selecting interests and activities

🤔 You might have noticed the sequence of ‘Weather’ and ‘Time of travel’ questions. Well, the hierarchy of these two specific questions, was also decided logically as follows :

Deciding the sequence of ‘Time of travel’ and ‘Weather’ questions :

🔷 The primary factors considered while planning a trip are — place, time of travel, climate and budget.

• Evidently, the place ( maybe continent or country ) is the foremost preference any user has.

🔷 Initially, the sequence of the questions was — Place ➡️ Weather ➡️ Time of travel But,

Weather and months/days can have a lot of clashes and the user might get frustrated to not get the results / see the error redundantly.

Following is an EXAMPLE of a clash due to ‘Weather’ preceding the ‘Time’ question :

Example of a clash between Weather and Time question

Solution : eliminate the options that are not working out with the options selected in the previous question.

1️⃣ Either, months can be eliminated depending on the weather selected

2️⃣ Or, weather options can be eliminated depending on the time selected

☝🏻 Considering the mental models and the complexity of eliminating days or months, a safer bet can be made that people have more priority for the “time” rather than the weather.

Hence, Place ➡️ Time of travel ➡️ Weather > Place ➡️ Weather ➡️ Time of travel

Here is an example of how the above problem was solved :

Suggestions of places/trips — Logic used

NOTE : Instead of recommending just the places/destinations, it was only logical to suggest the trips or packages along with them. After all, the end business goal is to increase the conversion rate!

There were three possible solutions that could be applied to generate suggestions based on the entered choices :

Logics for generating suggestions/recommendations

Drawbacks :

• OR — This will generate some results in the end, even if there is no place that is satisfying all the choices entered, which doesn’t really solve the purpose of the quiz.
• % matching — It is difficult to determine which preferences have matched the most, along with their percentages individually.

☝🏻 Since the goal was to generate as narrowed-down results as possible, I decided to go with AND logic to catalyze the suggestions.

On the other hand, OR logic is used for questions where multiple choices can be selected.

Here is an example of OR logic used in ‘ multiple choice ‘questions :

Example of OR Logic used in multiple options’ questions

💡 Here’s another thought, just like the sequence of ‘weather’ and ‘time’ could create a clash, similarly, there might be several other cases where these clashes could happen. Isn’t it?

Handling clashes and Empty states :

🔶 Due to AND logic, there would be cases where a preference entered by the user does not hold any relevance with other preferences or are conflicting with each other. So there might be immense possibilities of clashes and consequently, there’d be no results.

P.S : We already saw an example of a clash in the Weather and Time questions.

There were 4 possible ways to handle the clashes :

1. Throwing an error after the users submit the quiz
2. Showing no. of trips found — in this case, ‘0 trips found for the entered choices’
3. Eliminating the options from the next qs, that do not match with all the previous options selected
4. Throwing an error message at the qs, mentioning which choices are causing a clash

Following are the examples of the above solutions :

Possible solutions to handle clashes/errors

👍 The fourth option — enables users to decide which preference to edit at this point.

🔶 Now I had to think about how can the users edit any preference at this point —

• including the current and
• all the previous preferences,

since it’s possible that the users might want to change some other preference rather than the one where they are getting an error.

🔶 Oh but wait!

This also got me thinking that even if there is no case of an error,

❓ what if the user wants to change any previously selected preferences

OR

❓ what if the users just want to check what all options they have selected until now ( Recognition over Recall )

Solution :

👎 Since all the questions are on a separate screen, tapping on the ‘back icon’ every time to go to a previous question, is obviously a bad UX.

👍 Giving an option on every screen, that can be accessed at any time during the quiz, to view as well as edit the inputs, was the best solution.

Let’s see an EXAMPLE, where the user is getting an error :

Example of handling an Error and ‘Recognition over Recall’

‘No preference’ — another Solution for clashes :

💡 Did you notice in the visuals above, that there’s a ‘No preference’ option in every question of the quiz?

Here’s why :

🔷 In case of clashes due to conflicting preferences, if a user selects ‘No preference’, the error is resolved.

🔷 Additionally, there might be cases where the user doesn’t have any preference for a particular question.

Visuals of ‘Suggestions of places & trips’ 🎨

Visual iterations :

Final Designs 💫

Bottom sheet for Suggestions of places

Place information screen

Trip information screen

Journey of the ‘Home’ Screen

Following is the depiction of how the ‘Home Screen’ adapts itself to the various stages that the users are in :

Adaptation of HOME screen to various stages of the user

Learnings & takeaways 📝

This was my first full-fledged product design project, in which I did everything from scratch — looking for the problem space to building a design system for the app to drafting this case study. I truly enjoyed working on this case study and especially loved the ‘Travel’ niche that I picked up. It has magnified my thirst to travel more 😋

Additionally, this whole process has taught me a lot about every aspect of product design, and there is only so much I can list down!
Following are a few of them :

• Building a type scale, making color palettes, accessibility, spacing and a lot more visual aspects
• Which problem is genuinely a problem that can be solved by a ‘digital product’ and make users’ lives easy
• Defining the problem space, user stories and personas is so freaking important — every product and design decision can be taken based on them.
• Building a product is majorly a fight between achieving Business goals and User goals. You just have to strike the right balance to achieve both and OPTIMISE for the “primary problem” you’re solving.
• Lastly, having a mentor or a guide, who can guide you in the ‘Right direction’ and validate your work — is a blessing and super important to produce fine results. Trust me on this. 🙂

BTS 👀

I like the traditional way of making notes. These helped me while making design decisions and drafting the case study as well.

Future Scope of the Project / Improvements :

There are a few other things that I have considered/thought of to enhance the product in terms of user experience and business growth :

• Factors & preferences of a traveler change with a lot of demographics and not just who they are traveling with. With a more in-depth and large-scaled research, the sequence & categorization of the quiz can be done according to these demographics.
• ‘Workcation’ is something that is trending currently. A quiz can be created specifically for this demographic of people, with the help of proper research, since the factors considered here are quite different from any other vacation.
• Even though ‘Create a trip’ has been mentioned as a feature in the app, I haven’t worked on it. Hence, there could be many edge cases possible for — when does a user would like to ‘Create his own itinerary’.
• From a business POV— relevant notifications can be sent to
  interact with and re-engage the users after their first usage or booking of a trip.
  For instance :
  1. sending them real-time notifications with new trips, offers, discounts, and more
  2. recommending them trips/packages with the help of their wish list, search history, or previously booked trips
  3. reminding the user that it’s been a while since their last ‘booking’

Disclaimer : All the articulations for the quiz/form feature were based on my research and understanding of the mental models of the users and the design patterns used in the existing tourism products.

That’s it, folks. Hope I could narrate it well ^_^

Thank you for making it to the end.

This project seemed like a never-ending task, with so much chaos and hurdles. I would not have remained sane and touched the end line without Paritosh Kumra ‘s infinite & detailed feedbacks and discussions. Also, many thanks to my good friend, Sarvesh Pansare for being a constant support. Lastly, huge thanks to Abhinav for letting me be a part of the 10kdesigner’s cohort!

Got some feedback? Or want to have a chat? Kindly reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.