Tripadvisor
Case Study

Duration: 2022.10-2022.12
Role: UX Designer / Project Manager

01. Scope

As an UX case study prepared from the standpoint of a project manager's workflow, we began our project by developing the problem statement, mission statement, and scope statement：

Problem statement:

The problem that our project aims to solve is the challenges that come with booking and managing trips to foreign places, specifically for U.S. colleges who are looking for an abroad experience. To understand the magnitude of this problem, we explored a report from the U.S. Travel Association in 2018. This report indicated that 18-24% of U.S. citizens state that logistical planning and coordination are barriers to traveling (U.S Travel Association, 2018). Other barriers include air travel hassle and safety and security concerns. It is also important to note that this is a year-round problem as students can pursue academic travel outside the regular spring and fall semesters. Lastly, it is important to note that traveling booking usually occurs online on both computer and mobile devices.

Mission statement:

Our project aims to alleviate some of the stresses and pressures that come from planning a trip to encourage those on the trip to focus on achieving their best performance in academic conferences and learning new cultures and customs. Our solution attempts to address the problem statement by creating an extension to Tripadvisor, which focuses on making transportation management and itinerary planning simpler and more collaborative. This solution targets college students in the U.S. who travel to foreign countries, especially in groups, for an academic conference meeting. We hope that an intuitive extension to a popular platform like Tripadvisor that allows for easy group trip planning will help reduce the barriers often associated with traveling, as stated.

Scope statement:

Our project will focus on making trip planning and management easier, and therefore, we thought it would be useful to create an add-on feature to an existing travel application that already has other travel-related features. We will follow Tripadvisor's predefined UI elements and styling guides for our design rather than generating a new one ourselves. This is much more efficient and reasonable for our semester-long timeframe. Since TripAdvisor already has features for booking and renting, we will exclude these features. Instead, our project will emphasize making transportation management and itinerary scheduling easier. Another aspect of our solution is making the planning a more collaborative process. Our project will include user research and both Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi UX designs demonstrating our solution.

User Research

We created a google survey to gather a larger quantity of data responses to grasp users' behavior regarding trip management better. To achieve this goal, we shared our survey online through social media. We also sent direct links to our connections who fit our user group and gathered around fifty responses. 

Our survey questions targeted three areas: trip preferences, trip challenges, and trip platforms. We want to know more about Trip preference to learn how users typically prefer to travel. Trip challenge aims to investigate some of the most difficult tasks for users when planning a trip. And finally, we targeted trip platforms because we want to learn how well current trip management platforms assist users in making trip management easier. Then, we evaluated our data from those three dimensions and surfaced key behavior patterns and issues users experience when they manage their trip.

Some key research findings we gathered are:

  • Over 70% of our participants indicated that they would stay in foreign countries for one to two weeks

  • More than 70% of respondents stated that they usually travel with a small group of two to three

  • “Ineffective team communication” had an over 40% voting rate regarding the shortcomings of existing trip management applications

  • Over 40% of respondents reported that they value the trip planning feature the most on their trip management platform

  • Over 50% of respondents reported they see deciding places to visit as their most challenging task

Overall, Our Refined Goal:

aims to make transportation management and group itinerary planning easier. Particularly a feature that our solution has that existing solutions tools do not fully address is how to make planning trips in groups rather than alone. On most other platforms, every individual has to make their own arrangements and cross-check with their friends if they changed their plans. This is inefficient and usually causes miscommunication which is a big issue in group planning. Our solution will therefore focus on making trip planning collaborative. Additionally, instead of creating a new platform, we are using a well-known extension, Tripadvisor, so everything is in one place. 

Final design

Feature 01: transportation

The first feature assists users in planning transportation. This feature aims to resolve the issue of anticipating transportation needs in an unfamiliar foreign environment. We believe that adding this feature could make the overall plan more complete. It could also prevent users from incorrectly planning connections between trips due to ignorance of the transportation situation and failure to consider local commuting conditions.

In the original Tripadvisor, users could create travel plans and add saved items to the created plans. However, there is no feature to make the plan more complete with transportation, which is one of the biggest concerns users have reported from our UX research. In our redesign, we added the option to add transportation between events that have already been added to the plan.

Feature 02: group plan management

The second feature we proposed is adding friends to the plan and group plan management. Users can add friends to their plan in the original TripAdvisor design. In our redesign, we improved this feature to better meet our user group's needs. First, users can add their friends from their friends list to their trip plan. Then, users can choose to add saved events (including hotels, attractions, or other categories) from their friends' saved lists to the group plan. Users can review each group member's list and figure out the attraction that multiple group members save. This function helps users to coordinate everyone's opinions more easily.