Alex Cama

The project

The goal was to create a travel booking app that could potentially solve some of the issues travelers often face. In this case study, I’ll explain my idea, prototype, and thinking process. This was a solo project created in one week. I was in charge of the research, benchmarking, app features, design, and testing.

The research

I sent out a survey and conducted 10 interviews. Here are some insights that became my starting point:

“I love backpacking, people you meet always take you to interesting places. “ Mark

“I hate how people can geotag places on Instagramnow. It ruins it for everyone.” Jen

“I follow artists and musicians on tour through their social media. They share the coolest places.” María

“I love listening to Passport, a travel podcast that always talks about curiosities and crazy things about different cities. Their recommendations are the bomb!” Christopher

After some affinity mapping and data analyzing I learned 3 main things:

• People don’t want to be tourists. They hate organized tours but love meeting new people.

• Most people travel because they care to learn about other cultures and enriching their lives with new experiences.

• Almost everyone struggles to find original travel ideas. They often use social media, literature, and films as well as friend recommendations.

How can I empower people that hate trite sightseeing to find interesting travel ideas? How can I help them have the enhanced experience of travelling with a local?

Meet our user

Idea

If people find travel inspiration in culture and love travelling with locals we could help them with an app that plans routes curated by the world’s most interesting creators. Not only will it be customizable according to their tastes, but it will also feature recommendations from the creator’s favourite places or home towns.

What’s out there?

Apps researched: Kayak, Edreams, Booking, Muchoviaje, Hopper, Skyscanner, Flio, Travelperk, Google flights.

In general, travel booking apps usually offer airline deals and promotions. Sometimes they sell packages with flights + accommodation or hotels + tours, but they are never custom or planned by someone relevant. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn how these platforms display their pricing, different travel options and checkout flow.

However, even if there are countless booking apps and travel bloggers, there really isn’t a service that offers both customizable recommendations from experts and flight and accommodation reservations. The closest benchmarks I could find are:

Insights and early explorations

After some sketches and early testing a few things became clear:

• Users felt it was important to get asked about their previous trips, not only to not get repeat recommendations but also to learn more about their preferences.

• Users suggested to also have food related questions since that is one of the reasons why they travel.

• Social media and entertainment platforms came up a lot in research. Connecting the app to Spotify, Imdb and Netflix to learn about user preferences and skip the onboarding might be an interesting feature down the line.

What’s the goal?

Creating a travel booking app that tailors recommendations based on the user’s interests.

Turning scribbles into prototypes

Early testing made clear how the app needed to be very intuitive and also showcase the main content curators clearly. It also showed me how important imagery was for the experience.

As visual as possible

Users wanted to visually choose their preferences to quickly get to the final recommendations by their favorite creators.

It also became clear that it was important to properly tag all the photos so people could quickly understand what they were referencing and also who was behind every suggestion.

Learnings and next steps

Go into hi-fi earlier

Having the prototype ready as soon as possible is valuable but I should have gone into hi-fi sooner in order to have all the relevant iterations ready for testing. Hi-fi takes longer but has many more nuances.

Connecting to other platforms

I’d like the survey to have an option to connect to your Goodreads, Spotify, and Netflix accounts in order to fetch your playlists and liked items for a more tailored experience..

Cohesive style

I’d love to take my time to improve the onboarding survey section. Instead of photography I’d like to work with illustrations with a more unique style to make it more cohesive with the goal of the app.