Adventure with HAWAI‘I Magazine’s (AWHM) target user is anyone thinking about or planning a trip to the beautiful Hawaiian Islands.
The goal of this project is to learn how people plan a trip in order to empathize with users and identify their pain points and unmet needs in order to create a collaborative digital planning website.
UX/UI Designer
HAWAI‘I Magazine is looking to take their brand to the next level. With already having an insider role about the best places to eat and things to do here in Hawai‘i, they are always trying different things to give you the best quality content on what’s now on the Islands. The next step is to help our audience plan the best trip to Hawai‘i. This collaborative digital trip planning website will help users create a solid itinerary with their travel mates where they can vote for which activities they want to do together.
To empathize with users and identify their pain points and unmet needs to create a good collaborative digital trip planning website.
First, I began doing a competitive analysis on AWHM’s top competitors, Google Trips, TripIt App and Yelp and looked at their content to see how it was structured, what was working and wasn’t working. Below are my findings.
After conducting a competitive analysis, I was able to interview 5 participants who have planned a trip in the last year. Due to conducting this research during COVID-19, I allowed for a longer time period for participants since there was little to no travel during this time. During the interviews I had participants describe the last time they planned a trip and how they did it. Below are my findings.
Based on my research, I’ve created groupings and similarities between the people I’ve interviewed to create a persona of a 30 year-old marketing director named Sarah Anderson.
age: 30
occupation: marketing director
Location: new york, ny
last trip planned: Jan 2020
Sarah Anderson is a Marketing Director at an ad agency in New York City. She loves to travel and has always dreamed of taking a vacation to Hawai‘i. Sarah has never been to Hawai‘i but has a loose idea of what type of activities she wants to do while sheʻs there. She likes to plan things, but also loves to be spontaneous at times. Sarah also wanted to travel with a few friends. She didnʻt know where to start planning for her trip. Thankfully with an easy Google search, she came across hawaiimagazine.com. There is where she read a few articles about things to do and places to eat on O‘ahu. She noticed on their website that they have a travel planning app. She hopes she can use that app to plan her trip and help guide her once she arrives to the Islands.
“This HAWAI‘I Trip Planner app
made planning and enjoying my trip easy."
Based on my research, I was able to gain some insight in the order that people plan their trip. Searching for a place, deciding if they want to go, checking to see if that is something their travel mates want to do, and deciding if they will do this activity. Below is my user flow for adding an activity for the first time to the collaborative digital trip planner website and approving the activity for the digital itinerary.
Since HAWAI‘I Magazine has existing branding, it was only needed to create an extension of that brand to create Adventure with HAWAI‘I Magazine. Planning a trip to Hawai‘i should be fun and exciting. This mark/logo has a playful look and feel with the gentle waves and vibrant color scheme.
Based on my research, all participants needed some type of way to discuss and approve proposed activities for the trip. Within the collaborative digital trip planning website, you and your travel mates can vote yes, no or maybe for each activity.
In these final versions, collaborating tools were resolved and informational/directional icons were created in place of too much body copy.
After finalizing the hi-fi wireframes, I’ve created a UI Kit to hand off to developers.
To help with user testing, I’ve created a prototype for the collaborating digital trip planning website based on the user flow I’ve created and any unmet needs that were found. Want to try it out? Let us know what you think!
For this project I was able to conduct usability testing after creating the hi-fi wireframes. Because the user flow was very long, I gave participants small ques along the way to help them get through the flow. Below are my findings.
With this being my final project in DesignLab, I was able to take all my mistakes from previous case studies and do a better job with this final case study. I found myself asking better questions when uncovering goals, needs, pain points and frustrations in individual interviews. For user testing I started to ask them if they understood certain things in the design and tried to get better insight in their thinking while going through usability testing. Overall I enjoyed this challenge because this was the largest project I designed hi-fi wireframes for.
