ALLMYNE is seeking to create a feature on their app to allow users to create their own personal itinerary. This would require research, design and testing into the requirements necessary for planning, booking, and tracking itineraries.
To gain insight on the current market I interviewed and spoke to a handful of users that travel to understand their use cases and struggles.
PAIN POINTS
Downloading too many apps
Users report downloading multiple apps while traveling and navigating back and forth to complete simple tasks.
PAIN POINTS
Trouble finding good recommendations
Where’s the best spot? What’s popular? Without knowing a local, users have to spend hours researching to fill an itinerary.
To create this feature successfully I created a list of components needed and broke them down.
COMPONENT
Planning
Being able to search general and specific locations, anything from restaurants to cities. Keeping these logged in a day by day itinerary.
COMPONENT
Editing
Move, remove, and add new locations or days into your itinerary for flexibility.
COMPONENT
Posting
To create a community, users can post itinerary onto a social media like feed. They can make itineraries public or private, with the option to share or delete the post.
After understanding the product requirements, I built a task flow map to understand the architectural complexity.
To gain feedback, I created a low-fidelity mockup. The mockups were presented to stakeholders to gain clarity if this was the right direction to proceed in.
During the meeting with the ALLMYNE team, we were able to brainstorm what the next steps looked like. This meeting can be summarized into 2 points.
FEEDBACK
How can the user achieve the same result with less steps?
FEEDBACK
Can we leverage AI in this process to provide a better service?
To help the user achieve the same result I iterated with a simpler process. I added in AI features that can increase potency as the app scales. I iterated on my previous design into higher fidelity prototypes.
Taking a step back I realized I didn’t fully address our user’s pain point of personalized itinerary. The AI recommendation tool can only give bits of suggestions. Forcing the user to still do most of the heavy lifting.
How might we make it easier for users to create personalized itineraries with less research?
In the same sense as if you were to visit your friends/family in another country. Likely they would show you around to their favorite spots. Now what if we could pull information from locals to create personalized itineraries for users?
To define the scope for this feature, I collaborated with the product manager and stakeholders to clearly define what was necessary. As we were on a tight timeline, not falling into scope creep was vital to this project launching successfully on time.
We agreed upon a new user type, tour guides. These users would be embedded from travel groups and help create itineraries for travelers.
Requirements for this new feature:
01
Contact a guide from a list of available tour guides.
02
Define and have selectable types of itineraries the user can choose from.
03
Live chat with tour guides to address any concerns and fine tune itineraries.
04
Tour guide profile page to invoke trust, credibility, and connection.
05
Itinerary customization from tour guide suggestions/creation.
I mapped out a new flow for creating an itinerary with the addition of interacting with a tour guide. These new steps are high lighted in yellow. These steps can be skipped, with the user always having the option to go back and enlist the help of a tour guide at any point in their journey.
Due to time constraints on this project, I had to make the decision to conduct research before designing, or have research post designing. I chose to create higher fidelity prototypes, which I could then test, validate, and iterate upon.
To design the following screens I had to keep in mind the time constraints for hand off. I designed a simple interface which with growth could scale into a more complex process, even involving AI to craft personalized itineraries.
To test my prototype I wanted to gain insight on how much traction would this function gain? Is it thought out? Which led me to conduct usability and task completion tests with potential users.
TESTING RESULTS
80% of users say they would use this feature
TESTING RESULTS
85% task completion rate
“I love the idea of having a guide to show me around a new city. ”
- Comment from one of the users
Other areas of the app were redesigned before the launch, many of which I worked on as well. Other features included in the redesign are: onboarding, tour guide sections, tour guide itinerary creation and much more. With much of the app still under development, metrics are TBA.
This feature of ALLMYNE’s app was the first to be redesigned. Adding in tour guides increased the app’s complexity by a lot. This was a whole new user type that needed their own entry point and authentication, use cases flows and etc.
Next steps were to work out tour guide use cases, monetization, and potentially scaling this itinerary creation using only AI.
