watching videos to understand travel planning, watching various vlogs to get into the mood and see how professionals go on trips, trying out competitor apps, reading case studies, articles, and taking screenshots whenever I found something interesting anywhere:)
Why secondary research?—
This was done more to validate stuff and make me understand travel planning which is the domain I am where the problem statement lies.
The insights from here will be super useful as I jump into prioritizing, ideating, and actually designing the screens.
Understanding the domain of travel planning
Validating assumptions with both qualitative and quantitative data.
know what my competitors are doing and how can I learn from them
Planning a trip is easy?
is travel planning really a problem?
Reading various articles around my problem statement helped me validate my hypothesis! As we can see in the above image has articles which say that travel planning is stressful, it is hard to choose a destination sometimes, planning with friends is such a task! In a nutshell, there are a lot of problems and we have to solve them:)
The Trip Planning Process
After getting an understanding of planning trips, I defined the trip planning process and divided it into phases with the help of secondary research data! This is how it looks→
Seems simple enough? So why my obsession with designing vacations? Because I want the vacation to be an effortless experience.
I want to make the least possible amount of decisions during my trip—so I need that foundational work to be finished for me before I embark on the experience.
Why one more travel app? Aren’t there so many already?
I tried out a wide variety of travel applications and websites. This was done to find out what others are doing well in terms of UX and to identify gaps in the travel industry.
Then I mapped them according to where in the trip planning process they fell which was defined earlier.
I had also written opportunities where I found gaps/problems before but then I thought it would be better to include them in the experience map where I could also list out the problems phase by phase.
Takeaways from competitor analysis
Studying so many different kind of travel apps helped me to know in which phases of trip planning are most competitors present so that I could find out gaps (opportunities) in the market.
Also I got to know about what features should be must have in travel apps, got to know about various design patterns that were being used.
There were only two apps which I could find which were kind of solving for the complete trip planning experience. For example, the apps that helped in organization ( making itinieraries) do not have travel content to explore from. No one was solving for all the major problems identified by my primary & secondary research!
Hardly any apps are India specific. Cater to a foreign audience. Indians have different needs, goals, behaviour, motivations etc. also they do not have data about Indian destinations.
No app was solving for group trip planning in a collaborative manner & about finding an ideal travel destination. This was also my initial problem statement was is validated now✅
The gaps which were identified helped me as I prioritized to solve them from all the needs, painpoints and insights which were gathered from primary research!
Travel tips that are potential design ideas
a sneak peek at documentation
By watching videos, reading articles and documenting all of them, I had collected a lot of travel tips that were actually potential design ideas to the solve that problem so the user does not require to use that tip now. We do it for them. So I grouped them once again according to the trip planning phases wherever possible.
And this is not experience mapping. All this is done so that all the data that I have collected from secondary research is useful for me in the later stages of the design process. I can quickly get through various stages and use these insights for ideating! The ones which don’t make sense as design ideas can me used as travel tips!
Why textual data have all the fun? We have screenshots too:)
