CooMo Travel

The Brief: CooMo Travel combines all of the major features of Facebook, Trip Advisor, Kayak and Yelp for the purpose of travel. It will be a one-stop shop for traveling. Users will have the ability to purchase airfare, hotel and car rentals on CooMo Travel but the unique differentiating feature that CooMo Travel offers is the ability to create an entire trip itinerary in detail on the site with the ability for other users to provide recommendations and suggestions based on their own experience. It needs a redesign of the user experience to make it easier for new users to understand.

Timeline: 3 Weeks

Teammate: Sam Radcliffe

Tools: Sketchbook, Axure, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Google Sheets

Process: Stakeholder Interview, Market Research, Content Strategy, Surveys, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Journey Mapping, Card Sorting, Usability Testing, Mobile and Web Prototyping

Addressing the challenge: This was the big one: Facebook, Trip Advisor, and Yelp are entire industries in their own right, so a good synthesis was going to take some heavy research.

Stakeholder Interviews: Sam and I started our voyage by getting to know the founders, Tyler and Shawn. Both were Army veterans pursuing separate travel-related businesses, and they decided to combine forces to bring together the best aspects of their projects. Tyler had a growing travel site and itinerary builder, and Shawn was running a non-profit adventure company for veterans; he had some great ideas for badge-enabled gamification. This resonated particularly well with Sam and I, as we were well-versed in the ways of Steam.

Research: We did broad-based market research into travel trends, eCommerce trends, emerging travel markets, and social media trends. What we found was the kernel for our proposed CooMo solution. We also researched the pros and cons of gamification and how to deploy it in a way that drives user engagement, without being a skinner box or failing to provide a sense of accomplishment. Our core travel findings can be best summed up with the following four quotes:

Survey: Our survey results cemented some of our research discoveries and also added a few unexpected surprises.

Competitive Analysis: The 8 trillion dollar global travel market is a highly occupied space. We analyzed the offerings from TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, Expedia, Roadtrippers, Kayak, Stay.com, Afar, and Yelp to find areas of overlap and exclusion. Based on our previous research we found there was an unmet need for travel sites that offer personalized results. Many existing sites had city guides, but these were always broad, untargeted, and few put much emphasis on a local experience, which serves changing travelers’ tastes as well as the budget conscious.

User Interviews: A picture was forming based on our research and survey, but we wanted more qualitative data so we sat many people down for a more in depth interview. We also went to local hostels to talk to budget conscious travelers from other countries, which is where we learned what we needed to solve the problem. The split remained even between planners and wingers, but I was personally surprised by the New Zealanders who had booked a 3 week, multi-city American trip with the plan to “google cool things to do” in the city.

The Solution: We felt we knew enough to move forward. Our system would need two similar but distinct parts: a desktop website to facilitate those who planned in advance with real time feedback, and also a mobile version that would focus more on local discoverability and social sharing. The site should interface with existing social networks to provide targeted recommendations from the user’s social network as well as crowd-approved local experts. It should help users build an itinerary, view popular or friend’s itineraries, and also create a rewards system so that people build up the database by reviewing local attractions and posting their own itineraries.

Affinity Maps and Personas: We created three personas based on the major trends in our data, which informed the tasks needed for a functional site: an older millennial with more expendable income who plans grander trips through a desktop website, a mobile first younger millennial that plays it loose, and a local expert who is platform agnostic.

Journey Mapping: With our design goals realized we aggregated talking points from the interviews to help us visualize the user’s needs at different pain points and to make sure we thought about how to address those. We found it interesting that there were some reciprocal elements in the local expert’s journey compared to the travelers.

Card Sorting: During our card sorts the desktop version took shape, and while there is always some variance between testers, it was clear that a two column solution was needed, with trip planning on the left and real time updates on the right. The feed column collates posts about the areas the planner is looking at and provides a system for the planner to reach out to his network.

Wireframes and Testing: Based on the results of our card sort, our goal was to make it clear that the social side represented a person’s feed, which updates based on their itinerary actions. An early thing we noticed was that a simple dividing line between the columns made people feel like they were less interconnected. This also led me to revise the wireframe with more content specificity, which clarified the relationship for testers. Additionally, people wanted the itineraries to be the first element they saw, so they could modify popular/friend’s trips to suit their needs. I also created a mockup for the mobile version which would have similar functionality to Tinder, where a user could pull up a targeted list of nearby points of interest that could be “swiped right” into a queue.

Further Consideration: The “badge” style gamification was a point of interest to the stakeholders and something that, if deployed properly, could drive emotional investment. The best rewards are ones that provide the user a sense of genuine accomplishment rather than hitting an arbitrary point. Some aspects should be transparent, such as a “Taco Expert” badge for reviewing 15 taco stands in your city, but other aspects should be hidden and discoverable. Research has shown that random acts of reward leads to the greatest engagement. Finally, there should be some planned “collaborative” badges, which would provide a chance for people to reach out to local community members or fellow travelers to book group engagements.

The site when logged in. The feed on the right has recent updates and broad suggestions based on your network and preferences.

1. Glenn searches for “Skiing,” and the map shows the locations based on popular results and his friends’ relative posts. 
2. He makes a post to his network and pins it, so it will always be at the top of his feed. A friend makes a recommendation.
3. Recommendations based on his friends’ ratings, and some popular targeted site-wide items.

1. The map highlights the resort he has selected. 
2. His feed updates to reflect his network’s recommendations for skiing.
3. He expands a recommendation to read a more detailed review. If the location is associated with a public badge it will be displayed here. He can also rate the review to help the system maintain high quality and relevant reviews, or add a review of his own.

1. The map zooms in to the area around the resort he has added to his itinerary. 
2. His feed updates to reflect what his network has said about attractions around the resort.
3. The resort has been added to his itinerary, and the suggestions change to show attractions around the resort.

1. The map highlights items he has added to his itinerary, to help him track distance. 
2. His feed updates to reflect what his network has said about attractions on the expanded itinerary.
3. He expands a highly rated itinerary one of his friends has published.

App login screen, to sync the mobile app with her account, and download Sophia’s current itineraries or build a new one.

1. Sofia taps “What’s Near Me” and gets a familiar Snapchat/Tinder picture grid. 
2. She can swipe an item to the right and directly add it to her itinerary, or tap it to get more information. She can swipe an item to the left to remove it, and help the system match her interests.

1. She taps an item to get more info, and add it to her itinerary. 

1. Her itinerary, she can pick an attraction and GPS will guide to it. 
2. Her camera and post field so she can share and interact with her network. 

1. At the event she selected she can take a picture and post it to her feed, and provide real time feedback.