Group Road Trip Planner

A group road trip planning feature based on Google Map that makes travel task assigning and routes planning efficiently.

Full Process Deck

OVERVIEW

Problem

Mike is a college student. The winter vacation is coming soon, he wants to initiate a road trip on Route 1 with some friends. But it’s not easy for him to organize a 10-people travel group because there are lots of things to consider for a successful trip such as letting each group member shares responsibility and making trip routes collaboratively that satisfying everyone. Mike has had no experience being a group leader before. That makes him feel unconfident and a little bit overwhelmed just thinking of organizing a group of people on a trip.

More potential problems Mike thinks are……

Uncertain

Lack of a clear visual plan, group members may quit the plan temporarily because of lots of uncertainty. In other words, members usually have a low sense of responsibility. The sudden withdrawal can cause great trouble in travel planning.

Ineffective

In most cases, the group leader writes a group plan, shares it with members, and asks their opinions. Members are unable to participate in planning trips synchronously. This is time-consuming.

Separated

There is no application both have group travel planning and navigation function. After planning in the travel planner app, users need to add routes again in a map application, like Google Map.

Solution

On the one hand, designing a group road trip planning feature based on Google Map that helping people organizing and managing trip. On the other hand, creating a delightful experience for group members as well.

Create a Trip and Group Up

If you want to organize a road trip, click to create a trip and then group up friends from your contacts.

Assign tasks and View Responsibility

As the organizer, you can assign tasks to members, eg. booking hotels, renting cars, and buying tickets. You can also view everyone’s responsibility. But members can only view their own responsibility.

Accept Trip Invite and Set Preferences

If someone invites you to join a trip, you will receive a notification. Accept the invitation to join the group. For each trip, you can set your preferences about “On Road” “Diet” and “Accommodation”.

Make Routes Collaboratively and Chat

By making routes and plan collaboratively, everyone will be satisfied. You can also chat with other friends to discuss anything eg. exchange assigned tasks.

RESEARCH

Interview

In the beginning, I wrote down many potential problems of group leaders and group members from my Participatory Observation and Cognitive Mapping based on my user empathy. To understand the users in deep, I interviewed 4 people in either of the two roles.

Persona

Journey Map

Pain Points

After conducting the interviews, created personas, and the journey map, I distilled 4 key takeaways of their pain points.

For Group Organizer

Feel annoyed if someone quit the travel group after all the plans have been made
Discussing travel plans with different people on different social media make things complex

For Group Members

Low participation in planning the trip
Feel unfair if the organizer assigns some tasks such as booking hotels to me without knowing what other members will do or not

Competitive Analysis

In my study of other group trip management apps

All of them are independent apps ( not tied with map apps )
Most of them only have one or two key features such as “expensing record” which are not functional enough for a successful group trip planning
None of them considers the problem “how do the group member assign tasks to members”.

HOW

MIGHT

WE?

How might we improve the communication efficiency from forming a road trip travel group to the departure?

How might we make everyone feel more involved in planning the trip?

How might we make group members feel fair to take on more team responsibilities?

DESIGN

Goals

Before taking “How Might We” questions to brainstorm, I set 3 design goals to keep myself always consider the user needs in the process of “Go Broad to Go Narrow”.

Efficient

Group owner and members plan the trip, coordinate responsibility and chat in one platform

Engaged

Group members will feel more engaged if they can contribute to planning routes, booking hotels, and let the owner care about their travel preferences

Responsible

It will be more fair if every member shares some responsibility for the owner

Solution Mapping

How People Plan a Group Road Trip Currently

Low communication efficiency was the biggest issue of the typical user flow. There were many opportunities for me to optimize from building a road trip group to managing groups on trips.

Initial User Flow

At first, I identified the 3 most featured links and wrote separated user flows: Build a Trip, Build a Group, and Add Stops. After getting several rounds of feedback from potential users who have group road trip experience, I simplified each flow, combine the 3 flows into one and add more group organization features beyond “Add Stops”

Final User Flow

Upper Half: The leader initiates a trip & Members accept invites.

Lower Half: 4 features of the app

Lo-Fi Iteration

Since user needs were the most important things to consider throughout the design process, I conducted a heuristic evaluation to find out usability issues of my lo-fi ideas and ran user tests to collect feedback.

Below were 5 key screens I made tweaks