Travelmate
Travelmate simplifies travel planning and document management to reduce stress and improve the travel experience.
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
DURATION
160 hours
TOOLS
FIigma, Miro, Photoshop
Project Overview.
The why?
Imagine this: It’s a week before your trip. You’re excited but suddenly realize—where are all my confirmations? What time’s my flight? Did I book the hotel? Panic sets in as you dig through emails and notes, wondering how travel became so chaotic.
As an avid traveler, I experienced this frustration firsthand—missing flights, losing confirmations, and wasting time piecing together plans. Realizing others likely felt the same, I set out to create a better solution.
"How might we reduce the frustrations of travel and organize reservations and confirmations in one place?"
The Challenge:
To create a streamlined tool that consolidates essential travel information in one accessible place, making travel planning simple and enjoyable for users who value efficiency.
The solution
Travelmate: A centralized travel organizer focusing on three essential functions:
1
Organizing Reservations: All travel confirmations—flights, hotels, and rentals—are consolidated in one interface.
2
Sharing Itineraries with Friends: Users can easily share itineraries with friends and groups.
3
Expense Tracking & Splitting: A tool to track and split costs within groups.
Secondary Research
Understanding the travel space was essential. Through secondary research, I gathered insights on industry trends and user preferences.
Findings:
82% of bookings occur without human interaction, and 66% are made directly on provider sites, signaling a need for tools that organize details from various sources.
Only 24% of travelers use travel agents, reflecting a shift toward self-service planning and demand for streamlined travel management.
Discovery:
This shift highlights a growing demand for self-managed travel solutions..
Market Analysis
I analyzed competitor products like TripIt and Google Trips to identify strengths and weaknesses in the travel management market.
Key Insights
Feature Overload: Many apps are cluttered with excessive tools that users rarely use.
Business-Oriented Focus: Competitors mainly cater to business travelers, which can make the interface complex for leisure users.
Limited Social & Group Features: Few apps offer features for sharing itineraries or splitting expenses, essential for group and leisure travelers.
Conclusion:
Travelmate would stand out by focusing on three main aspects: organization, social sharing, and expense tracking.
User Interviews.
Through user interviews, I gathered detailed feedback on their experiences with current travel management systems.
Participants for user research were selected based on their travel frequency, habits, and how they manage their travel documents. I focused on both business and leisure travelers, as well as those who frequently organize group trips.
Research Goals
To understand the needs of young travelers, I set out to answer a few critical questions:
How do travelers currently organize trips?
What specific features would help them stay engaged with the app?
How could the app best support shared travel experiences?
key pain points
1
Time Wasted Searching for Documents: Users spend excessive time locating scattered travel details, leading to frustration and stress.
2
Difficulty Sharing with Friends: Coordinating plans with friends is challenging without an efficient sharing feature.
3
Concerns Over Missing Flights: Users worry about overlooking key details, especially flight times and reservations, due to disorganized information.
Insight #1
There is a need for an app that organizes itineraries.
Why? - Travelers often take screenshots or use email folders to organize travel details, which is time-consuming and prone to error.
Insight #2
This app can focus solely on organizing and not booking.
Why? - Travelers already have preferred booking apps for flights and hotels, which they continue to use for benefits like reward points.
Research Impact:
Research revealed key insights that directly shaped Travelmate’s direction:
Design Constraints:
Minimalist Design: Competitor analysis revealed that many apps are cluttered with business features. Travelmate will stand out with a clean, user-friendly interface tailored for leisure travelers.
Single-Platform Integration: Travelmate will consolidate information from multiple booking sources, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration with various reservation formats.
core features:
Sharing Itineraries: A one-tap feature allows easy coordination with friends and groups.
Expense Splitting: A built-in tool to track and divide costs, making group travel easier and more transparent.
Persona/ Empathy Map.
To better understand and empathize with the target user's needs, goals, and behaviors, I created two personas (including empathy map). These will serve as a guide for design decisions that prioritize user needs.
"I’m tired of digging through emails for reservations. I just want everything organized in one place and easy to share."
View Persona
“Planning group trips is a hassle. I need an easier way to manage who’s involved in each reservation and track shared expenses."
View Persona
Solution Sketching.
In the initial design phase, I created sketches to outline key user actions:
Create a new trip
This sketch outlines the thought process for creating a new trip, focusing on key questions:
What essentials are needed to start a new trip?
How does the user add extra details?
What critical information is required for each reservation?
This sketch outlines the thought process for designing the home screen and the information it will display, addressing key questions:
Where and when can others be added to a booking?
How can a reservation be shared?
VIEW FINAL SKETCHES
Making Improvements.
I conducted 2 rounds of usability tests with a total of 5 participants. The goal is to observe users to ensure they can complete core tasks smoothly, while identifying any pain points and strengths in the design.
"The usability test helped determine which ideas worked effectively and gave insights into how to improve for the end user."
Pain Point: Users struggled to recognize profile photos as clickable for updating friends in individual reservations. Many skipped this task.
Decision: A third tab was added to easily track friends and their reservations, allowing users to assign or remove friends from each reservation and split costs as needed.
Pain Point: Users had mixed opinions on where passports, should be stored. Three users preferred the hamburger menu for security, while two felt it should be in the profile section.
Decision: Personal documents were moved behind the hamburger menu for increased security, addressing user feedback.
Impact: Keeping the passport behind the hamburger menu could increase user confidence.
After finalizing the wireframes, the focus turned to creating a modern, clean, and intuitive UI that aligned with Travelmate's brand identity and tackled the issue of cluttered interfaces.
Logo
The Travelmate logo embraces a modern, minimalist style. Its rounded typeface creates a friendly, approachable look, making it perfect for Travelmate’s brand, which aims to appear welcoming and user-friendly.
Color Pallette
A calming blue color palette was chosen to represent trust and reliability. This color was used consistently across the app’s key actions, helping users easily navigate and differentiate between tasks.
Simplified Icons
Minimalist icons were integrated for easy navigation, ensuring that users would quickly understand how to manage their trips
Components
All components have rounded corners to create a friendly, approachable, which aligns with Travelmate’s goal of reducing the stress of travel planning.
Imagery
Bright, travel-themed lifestyle photography was used to evoke a sense of relaxation and adventure.
The usability test focused on assessing the onboarding process, trip creation, and ease of adding flight information, with secondary goals of updating personal documents and profiles and adding friends.
Adding friends & splitting costs
Problem: Determining when and where to add friends to a trip and addressing scenarios where not all users are included in every reservation.
Solution: Introduce a dedicated tab for managing friends on trips and their related reservations, allowing for easier organization and collaboration.
Creating comfortability with users
Problem: Users were uncertain about the security and location of storing their passports within the app.
Solution: The addition of a verification step to ensure users felt secure when adding important personal documents.
Adding a Trip & Home Screen:
Creating a new trip allows users to input the trip name, location, dates, and daily budget, and invite friends. Once saved, all upcoming trips are stored on the homepage.
oranization of itineraries:
Trips are organized by category—such as flights, hotels, and car rentals—and by day, allowing users to view details in both ways. Each reservation includes all necessary information, costs, and a list of friends involved.
adding friends & sharing expenses:
Users can add friends at various points and manage each friend per reservation, with the option to add or remove them as needed. A main tab allows users to track each friend’s expenses and see which reservations they’re part of.
SToring personal information:
Personal documents are securely stored behind the hamburger menu, with a verification process for access, providing users with added comfort and security.
Travelmate addresses the common frustrations of disorganized travel planning by offering a simple, centralized platform for managing reservations and itineraries. Through continuous user testing and iteration, the final solution provided a more intuitive, user-friendly experience for travelers, allowing them to focus on enjoying their trip rather than managing logistics.
FINAL OBSERVATIONS
After completing the prototype, my observations were as follows:
Task Efficiency: Users successfully completed tasks effortlessly and in a short amount of time.
Positive Experience: Users felt good using the app and found it easy to organize their information.
Future Use: Users expressed that they would definitely use the app when planning their next trip.
