This case study presents the research and design process behind Triptastic, a desktop tool to help groups plan trips. The project involves a focus on exploring multiple user research methodologies.
Date
8 Weeks, Sep - Dec 2022
Role
User Research & Designer
Company
CMU Interaction Design Studio
Problem
Organizing a trip can be a time-consuming and challenging task, especially when traveling with a group. It becomes even more difficult when trying to accommodate everyone's individual preferences and requirements. For college students, who often have limited income and experience with travel planning, the process can seem overwhelming. This project was completed as part of CMU's User-Centered Research Evaluation.
How might we facilitate an organized planning process that can increase group trip satisfaction for college students?
Solution
Our solution aims to reduce the clutter that is typically associated with trip planning through a hovering toolkit.
Research & Analysis
The team's research process spanned 1-2 weeks.
Walking the Wall
To form a foundational understanding of the problem, each member fo the team carried out our own background research through literature reviews and fly-on-the-wall observation of group trip-planning processes and frustrations. Afterward, we collaborated to develop a shared understanding of the problem domain through the "walking the wall" technique.
Abstraction Laddering
We found ourselves overwhelmed with the number of possible needs we found from our initial research. In order to narrow our main research question down, the team conducted a reframing activity with abstract laddering. With this exercise, we ultimately settled on the problem statement:
In what ways might we enable people to easily sort, group, and track different resources needed for travel planning?
Affinity Diagramming
To explore our new research question, the team conducted directed storytelling, allowing us to vividly recreate the context, process, and feelings of travel planning for a group without directly observing a group go through the whole process.
The four frustrations that emerged from affinity mapping informed the four primary feature flows of our product. These themes were consistently mentioned in all of our interviews, and our users were unable to identify any existing application that addressed all four issues.
Planning and Research
Uneven distribution of work can lead to frustration
Lack of trust in online sources
Allergies should be known upfront
Conflicting Values
Budget differences can be tricky
Different planning styles can cause tension
Different expectations can ruin a trip
Organization of Logistics
Students don’t keep track of budget, making things messy
No widely-used budgeting tool for trip planning
Reaching Consensus
Polls are used to gather people’s opinions
Conflict resolution requires communication and preparation
Empathy Map and Customer Journey Map
To further consolidate our findings, we created some models to better understand the thought processes and feelings of our users. Combining these findings with the themes from affinity diagraming, we were able to identify five design opportunities.
Ideation
Based on the five opportunities found during the analysis phase, the team quickly generated possible scenarios with the Crazy 8’s activity. Following this, we conducted priority voting to determine the four most intriguing ideas and their corresponding user requirements.
Four Main Ideas
I need a way to see what the group has discussed and resolved
I need to know everyone's expectations going into the trip
I need to be flexible about what other's want
I need to gather research from reliable sources
We continued to refine our ideas through storyboarding and surveys.
Through storyboarding and speed dating, we discovered that students were unwilling to switch to a completely new planning application, even if it was superior. They viewed the need to learn another tool as tedious and just another tab to add to the clutter. They instead wanted ways to deal with the problems of their current tools, such as Google Docs or Notion.
Keeping in mind that users didn’t want a brand new application, the team wanted to create a product that was instead complimentary to whatever platform the user is already using to plan their trips. We initially planned to do this with a Chrome extension, but class critique revealed that the extension made the information feel cluttered, limited, and immobile. I then lead the pivot in direction to a desktop application that would function as a “hovering toolkit”.
Cluttered
Forces everyone to use Chrome
Easier to navigate
Increased web browser flexibility
We finalized our product to be a hovering toolkit with three distinct sections that cover our four flows: smart research, discussion, resources, and travel profiles. We employed our lo-fi prototypes to validate three of the riskiest features of our product. Concerned that students might not be inclined to download a desktop application, we developed a demo and survey to gauge the App Net Promoter Score. Thankfully, it appeared that the benefits of our app exceeded the effort required to download another application.
Our theme revolved around a blue-purple color to instill a sense of calm and consistency to trip planning, which is often perceived as hectic.
Reflections
Working with the same team throughout the semester was both a rewarding and challenging experience. As the project manager of the group, I learned how to maintain a flexible mindset and to frequently restate goals, tasks, and takeaways to ensure the team was on the same page. One of my major takeaways from this project was the importance of not getting too attached to your designs. We found that we were too stubborn, which made pivoting harder to do later on.
