Trip.ai

AI-empowered fast and personalized travel itinerary
The recent developments in AI, has opened an opportunity in travel. The use of AI to help travelers find travel recommendations, book accommodation and plan trips is an exciting opportunity. Incumbent players such as Trip Advisor, Booking.com or Airbnb have been slow to use adopt AI to enhance the travel planning experience, providing an interesting market opportunity.

Trip.ai is a simple idea: a mobile app where users can discover and plan travel itineraries within minutes, instead of hours, using AI technology.
Roles
I assumed the following roles designing this app:
  • User Experience (UX)
  • DesignerInteraction (IxD)
  • DesignerUser Interface (UI)
Deliverables
Interaction Design:
High-fidelity interactive prototypes for key tasks on iOS
UX/UI Design:
  • User Experience (UX)
  • DesignerInteraction (IxD)
  • DesignerUser Interface (UI)
Project Specifications
Duration: 6 weeks
Tools:
  • Figma
  • Miro
  • Canva
  • Octopus
  • Balsamiq

Overview

Since the early 2000s, planning travel have always been a long and tiresome process. Travelers rely on a range of resources from online blogs to guidebooks to online travel aggregator such as, Trip Advisor to friends they may know. Unfortunately, there is no optimal solution. Every traveler comes with their own unique set of needs: budget, companions, accessibility, type of travel , just to name a few.
This is where personalized travel agencies have provided a valuable proposition. Unfortunately, travel agencies often are more expensive than booking directly. Even discounting the price point, travel agencies certainly cannot take into account every factor and needs of a traveler. With the recent advent of AI, there is a case to be made for AI to provide the same personalization as travel agencies, while being cheap, cost effective and scalable.

Problems

  • Fundamentally, all travelers have a range of different needs and wants that aren't always met with existing solution on the market.
  • Planning travel requires hours of planning across multiple different sources.
  • Hiring travel agencies can be expensive and pricing isn't always transparent.
  • There a range of unique travel ideas that don't get featured online or guides that travelers may enjoy.

Proposed Solutions

  • An AI-powered based on a database of millions of travel recommendations, ratings and other data points.
  • An easy to use app that allows travelers to easily add attractions and automatically create a itinerary.

By having a single app that can produce AI-powered travel recommendations, a traveler can save hours of research and planning, while receiving travel recommendations that are unique and specific to them.

Research

My research first centered around the competition space in order to understand how other apps are addressing similar issues. More than 100 user survey responses would help quantify what customers are paying for, and what they’re hoping to resolve. And lastly, one-on-one interviews would help me understand users’ journeys and specific issues the app would need to address.
Findings
  • No direct competition in the subscription management arena, but several attempts at providing programming guides.
  • Users averaged 5 paid subscription services per month and indicated a high level of frustration with the lack of transparency.
  • Concerns ran the gamut: from a simple lack of understanding (“I don’t know what I’m paying for”) to a strong desire for better management (“I want to optimize what I’m paying for”).

Getting Closer to User-Centered Design

Defining Key Differences in Motivations Through Personas

It might seem that everyone is interested in the same thing: finding the best places to travel that is cheap, fun without spending a lot of time.

Creating personas helped bring some clarity to those divergences, which would become important reference points as functions developed.

As research and design proceeded, I focused primarily on two main personas because they represented heavy emphasis of two key functions: creating itineraries that best reflect their interest in a short amount of time; creating itineraries that fulfills the needs of everyone traveling with the user.

Understanding the Journey

By creating and exploring the journey maps of two personas and their typical tasks, I uncovered key emotional/procedural moments that Trip.ai needed to address.

Exploring Common Tasks in Order to Heighten User Empathy

Rapid sketching allowed me to explore design patterns common among apps in the competitive landscape, helping me understand which needed to carry over into Trip.ai to ensure familiarity. This also helped identify screen types that could serve multiple functions, as well as swiping/touch gestures that would likely be the most intuitive.

Visualizing a User-Centric Experience

The high-fidelity prototype brought test users closest to the real experience yet, and it revealed some issues. While users were able to complete the onboarding experience, the realistic nature of it revealed some friction. The length of the onboarding process, the ability to customize the itinerary further and the ability to customize based on the mode of travel (i.e public transport, car rentals) were among the common topics raised by test subjects.

Visualizing a User-Centric Experience

Visually articulating all potential aspects of the Trip.ai brand (product, as well as marketing and beyond) meant defining a baseline design system that identified key elements of its visual vocabulary. I wanted Trip.ai visual design to always refer back to its core mission: making it easier and better to plan itineraries.
Predominantly green palettes imbued screens with a sense of excitement and modernity; simple button states and clear iconography would help make the itinerary feel more manageable; and a single, modern sans-serif with large, open counters ensured legibility and clarity in messaging.

Lessons Learned

Over the course of the project, I learnt a range of valuable lessons. First, there is no homogenous way to plan travel. Travel evokes a range of feelings for many people: excitement, fear, anxiety, sadness and more. It is important to design an app that takes into account theses feelings.

Second, the traveling experience starts from the moment you plan to travel. Planning travel, if done well should be an exciting experience; it need not be a means to an end, rather an end in itself.

Finally, for AI-powered travel itineraries to replace human planned itineraries, it must take into account hundreds of data points. There needs to be an interesting and engaging way to intake these data points beyond just questionnaires. After all, it is hard to imaging a user spending over 20 minutes answering over 100 questions.