My Contribution：End-to-End Product Design, User Research, UX design, UI design
Length: 2 months
Project Type：Startup Cooperation Project
Remove the hassles of organizing team trips.
My Contribution：End-to-End Product Design, User Research, UX design, UI design
Length: 2 months
Project Type：Startup Cooperation Project
Organizing team trips is laborious.
Team travel is a great way to strengthen team relationships. But organizing team trips is a headache, especially for students in universities. When I was in graduate school, I tried many ways to organize a more enjoyable team trip.
Current ways to organize team trips in college
Organizing a team trip through these ways is a real burden on organizers. I talked with my friends about it, and I found almost every student team encounters this problem, and there are many teams on campus.
So when I met Shuai Gao, the founder of a travel agency on campus, we decided to create a product to solve this problem: Help teams remove the hassles of organizing team trips.
Our team includes two travel agent salesmen, an Android engineer, and I was the only designer.
Triiip is an App that streamlines group trip planning by creating a more inviting communication experience.
It provides organizers and participants with an experience of "discussing a trip together" online. Its key function includes sending invitations, collecting opinions, discussing and voting for activities, confirming travel plans, making payments and so on. It can greatly enhance the satisfaction of team travel while vastly reducing the burden on organizers.
Interview
Due to limited resources, I mainly conducted user interviews with three kind of stakeholders and interviewed 19 of them:
I organized the collected problems based on the travel process into different categories: Planning, Traveling and After Travel. Based on interview results, I classified the user roles into organizers and participants. Yellow notes in the photo represent organizers; green ones represent participants.
Key Findings
Organizers: Build positive relationships among team members, provide opportunities for everyone to know and communicate with others.
Participants: Have fun, meet new people and get involved in the team.
Most of the problems occurred during the travel planning period, and issues during traveling were mostly caused by unsatisfactory planning:
Organizers: We spend a lot of time and effort to plan a trip. Most team members do not share their opinions when planning but complain a lot while traveling.
Participants: Unsatisfied with the itinerary, disliked the place, hotels, activities, food. I didn’t know any detailed arrangement before the trip.
I conducted in-depth analysis to the problems collected and got the following key insights.
It’s because of the participant's low engagement.
Most participants think organizers did not consider much about their ideas and did not share details of the plan, such as the conditions of hotels and the style of food, so they feel unhappy when the reality is quite different from expectations.
Because there is no good way to communicate.
Why didn’t the participants engage? Is it because participants are not interested? Why do people without interest participate in a trip?
In further inquiry, I found that it’s not that participants do not want to express their ideas, but they cannot find the right ways to express them. From the organizer's point of view, to collect and adopt the idea of every participant takes a lot of time and needs many auxiliary tools, and it’s unlikely that participants will cooperate. So in most cases, the trip decision-making process is dominated by a small number of organizers.
Here was the key problem we are going to solve:
How might we create a new way of communication to allow organizers and participants to easily exchange opinions when planning a group trip?
We also conducted competitive analysis and found that few apps focus on itinerary planning, and most of them are for individuals or small groups (less than 6 persons). Their features mostly do not involve the internal communication between trip organizers and participants.
We believe there is a great opportunity in the field of helping large (more than 10 people) plan team trips.
In order to provide a good way of communication for organizers and participants, we first need to know what information they need to exchange. I analyzed the research feedback and extracted necessary information for planning an enjoyable trip:
We need to change the communication mode from occasional communication of a small amount of information before to real-time communication of complete synchronization of information:
Depending on the information type and communication mode, and in conjunction with journey map, I have tried several different product structures and interaction processes:
Final Prototype
After several tests and iterations, I determined the main interaction process for each role based on userflow.
"The invitation is so exquisite, the trip must be interesting."
The starting point for communication is building relationships, so I designed a warm-hearted way to invite with a picture invitation to build a better starting point.
"It feels like the organizer is asking me if I have time and where I want to go."
The core goal of Triiip is to help organizers and participants have close communication, including voting or collecting opinions. I tried several ways to change the way of information presentation, and finally found that conversational interface is a perfect way, even payment can also be presented in this way. The advantage of this approach includes:
"It feels like we're in a playroom and we discuss what to play together."
Because Triiip was focused on inter-team communication based on a group trip between organizers and participants, I wanted to provide an immersive experience within each group trip, so I chose the sidebar navigation.
After the user selects a specific group trip in the navigation, all the contents of all pages are related to the group and each trip item’s information will include the discussion of team members. I hope that users can experience a feeling of "we’re in a playroom and we discuss what to play together" here.
Due to some reasons, Triiip was not launched in the end. But I still learned a lot and got new understanding towards user experience design. Two main lessons I learned from this project are:
1 Any test is better than no test.
Under limited conditions, we can start research from people around us. Throughout the design process, I got a lot of unexpected useful feedback from my friends and acquaintances.
2 Insist on getting to the bottom of the matter.
When doing user research and user testing, it is very important to get to the root of the matter. We cannot suit the remedy to the case until we find the root cause.