Our Location
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Project
TripPlannera is an AI-based mobile app that suggests an individual trip itinerary based on user’s interests and travel experience. It collects all the activities including tours, things to do, attractions, events, and restaurants to make trip planning easy and simple.
Challenges
One of the main challenges was creating a mobile app that would comprise all functionality of the TripPlannera webplatform and include all the traveling information that travel agents provide, such as flight dates, route plans, hotel info, attractions, etc.
However, this time the challenge was even more significant, cause the target audience consists of a wide array of segments and each one has its features and needs. So the mobile app should have been much responsive and simple in usage.
Exploration
We’ve started working effectively with the target audience and interviewed people who travel a lot and found out that most apps lack the opportunity to bring changes to the existing route or travel plan. Thus, we devoted special attention to the functionality that allows the editing of complex routes easily.
Prototyping
Given that the hardest thing is to start, we didn’t lay the development of primary prototypes aside; although they were elaborated greatly, we had a solid basis for a start. Discussing screens and navigation took several weeks.
Designs
As soon as all structure points were clarified, and the app’s IA looked impeccable, we took on the interface details. Since we’d already picked the color scheme and fonts for the desktop platform, we didn’t reinvent the wheel and focused on creating an easy and fresh look with the colors we had.
We aimed to make the interface evoke positive emotions and arousing mood — just like traveling does. After near work on small details and elements on the most of the screens, the application immediately came to life and the whole experience of using became more unified and solid.
After some testing with selected focus group and collecting positive feedback we finalized and approved the latest versions of all application screens and expended some additional functionality and technical pages. And it acquired the form that we had conceived at the begining.
Takeaways
The project taught the team that despite everyone can have a certain vision and working methods, it is always important to remember about the audience. You not always the same thoughts and needs as your target audience, that’s why the right dialogue with the customer is crucial, and listening to the people can bring better results than you’ve expected. This project was successful due to the fact that we tested our design with the right target audience, which gave us important information and positive feedback about the product.
