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Wanderlist
Helping students discover places and build personalized itineraries for travel.
Role: Product Designer
Date: October 2022 - December 2022
Team: Ginnie L., Victoria S., Kyle L., Laura Y.
Helping students discover places and build personalized itineraries for travel.
Role: Product Designer
Date: October 2022 - December 2022
Team: Ginnie L., Victoria S., Kyle L., Laura Y.
I created city discovery app Wanderlist over 8 weeks at Design Interactive, a human-centered design club at UC Davis. With my cohort team of 4 fellow designers, I developed a mobile prototype for Wanderlist and led design for the Discover feature. We presented our final product at the end of our term and Wanderlist was awarded Most Customer-Centric UX.
“Traveling to a new city is stressful. So many factors such as age, travel reasons, and money impact what people want from their travel experience. How might we help travelers better discover and experience the locations they travel to using an app?”
With our prompt to design a city discovery app, our team set out to learn more about people’s experiences with traveling, focusing on college students as our target audience due to the ease of recruiting participants. We conducted a literature review, distributed a survey, and held interviews over 2 weeks to learn how people discover new places and prefer to travel.
Survey
We received 80 responses from college students on our survey. Our survey questions focused on understanding participants’ frequency of travel, their concerns when traveling, and their experience planning or making itineraries. We found a few key insights: students' main concern about traveling is budgeting, itineraries are a popular tool to plan travel, and a variety of social media apps are used to discover places to visit.
Interviews
We also conducted interviews with 8 students. We asked about the last trip that they took and how their planning process went, as well as their usage of popular apps that are helpful for travel such as Yelp and Google Maps. Our interviews revealed that four main things were valued when it came to travel: pricing, reviews, transportation options, and a social aspect.
Students have a limited budget, explaining the need to find places that don't require high costs. We also learned from interviewees that they liked to go on trips with friends - therefore, decisions about where to go often came down to consensus and others' opinions. We additionally found that distance dictates planning. The farther away the location, the more our interviewees felt they needed to plan.
Survey responses for trip frequency and social media platforms used to discover places
Synthesizing insights from our survey and interviews, we decided to develop an app that would facilitate the process of trip planning and offer features to make it easier, such as itinerary and budgeting functions.
We created a few sketches to generate ideas for budgeting and planning solutions. Our sketches featured itineraries as a tool for users to manage and organize all of their trips, interest-based discovery, and categorization or filtering of places to enable users to find places that best suit their preferences and needs.
We also set out to incorporate some other tools like a map, which we believed would aid planning by enabling users to quickly visualize how far apart places are and assess their transportation options without jumping between multiple apps.
Initial wireframes focusing on place discovery and itinerary creation
In the process of building our user flow, we decided to break the app experience into two major sections - before the trip and during the trip. We expected that users planning their trip beforehand would be more involved with place discovery and itinerary-building, while users on the app during their trip would make more use of the map and expense tracker.
We built our prototype then tested with 8 participants, who navigated through our before-trip and during-trip flows. Through testing we identified a few pain points. We found that users weren’t sure what they would mainly use Wanderlist for. We offered a variety of tools for users to plan and manage their trips, but a lot of them overlapped with apps that they already use and are likely to stick with. Additionally, because we had so many features, they struggled with identifying the core feature - the main thing that would bring them to our app, specifically.
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Participants had trouble understanding our use of icons, especially in the tab bar. As a fix, we added labels to accompany new icons.
App features like splitting payments was compared to Venmo, which is already a widely-used app that users aren't likely to switch away from.
Participants shared that there were many features useful for trip planning, but it was difficult to determine what the main draw for the app was.
Following the synthesis of our results, we came away with the understanding that it was necessary to choose one feature to focus on. We chose to prioritize the itinerary and opted to cut the budgeting feature, reasoning that many users already use apps such as Venmo and Google Sheets to split payments and budget. We weren't sure if our budgeting tools were enough to bring users to the app. But by focusing on the itinerary and incorporating it with our place discovery feature, we believed that this would distinguish Wanderlist. We learned during our initial research that some people used Google Docs for itineraries as well as many other apps to find places to visit. Offering a platform for users to discover places and add them all to an itinerary within the same app could streamline the planning experience.
For the remaining 2 weeks of our project term, our team focused on building out our high-fi prototype. We created a design system and applied it to our designs, followed by a round of usability testing.
We made additional adjustments according to the feedback that we received. Continuing to work on the Discover tab, I made changes to the flow that allowed users to directly select which day they'd like to visit a place at the same time that they add it to their itinerary, removing the extra step needed to order the itinerary. I also expanded on the concept for discover categories, designing a screen where users can filter and find restaurants.
Onboarding
First-time users create an account then go through a brief product tour introducing them to the Itinerary and Discover features and highlights such as bookmarking places. They then create their first itinerary.
Discovering Places
Through the Discover tab, users can browse others’ public itineraries for inspiration and find places to visit. We sought to make place-finding easier by including categories such as Restaurants and Museums, and featuring itinerary tags such as Family-Friendly and Students to help users filter what they’re looking for. Users who know where they are going and want to include it in their itinerary can use the search function to add the place to their list, and have the option to select what day of their trip they’d like to visit the place for more detailed planning.
Using the Itinerary
We designed the itinerary as the “hub” for the trip. Accessible through the home tab, users can go to their itinerary to view all their added places, view where they’re located on a map to assess distances and proximity, and add or invite others who are going on the trip as collaborators.
Work on Wanderlist finished at the end of our 8-week term, concluding with a cohort presentation in which we were awarded Most Customer-Centric UX for our app. Designing for Wanderlist taught me important lessons about the value of user research and synthesis when it comes to identifying the solution space and narrowing scope, and I greatly expanded my interaction design skills working on this project.