Lantern Trips

User Research • AfFINITY & Journey MaPPING • UX/UI Design • Wireframing & PROTOTYPING

Lantern Trips was a travel app concept that aimed to inspire and simplify travel planning with collaborative itinerary building and sharing. Our overarching vision was to create a worldwide travel community that could iterate on open-source travel itineraries to share and build infinite curated experiences. A traveler spends a significant amount of time researching across many different sources, ultimately, this information is collected in a spreadsheet. Lantern Trips aimed to alleviate the stress of planning and provide a more streamlined experience so travelers could spend more time on the joys of traveling. Our goal here was to develop a minimum viable product (MVP).

Role & Process

This concept developed from my own pain points around travel planning and was accepted into the GRID110 community, where I met an incredible group of entrepreneurs and mentors. From this network, I compiled and managed a group of researchers, marketers, and developers that would help drive this project across the following phases. I sketched the initial wireframes, lead user interviews, and developed affinity maps, user personas, and a user journey map. Once I had this all mapped out, this helped inform high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for the project.

Phase 1
Research & LEARN

User Interviews
C&C Analysis
Task Analysis
Heuristic Evaluation
Card Sort
Affinity Map
Journey Map

Phase 2
design & prototyping

Paper Sketches
Wireframes
InVision Prototype

Phase 3
test & iterate

Usability Tests
Apply Changes to Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

Research

MARKET RESEARCH
We learned that spending in this market is supported by favorable macroeconomic indicators and is bolstered by a trend of spending on experience rather than tangible goods (particularly popular with Millennials). Millennials emerged as key players in travel not only due to their relatively large size, but also because of their strong inclination toward travel – nearly half say that travel is an important personal goal. This group is also more likely do their travel research across numerous sources, ask their friends/family, and research online using their smartphones.

USER INTERVIEWS

We tried to understand how travelers make plans and we found that they use established sites for hotel and travel booking. Use friends, locals, reviews, travel blogs, and social media influencers to decide where to go and what to do. Prioritize ‘authentic’ experiences.

From these learnings, I organized a collaborative ideation session to come up with the architectural structure and low-fidelity wireframes. Developed an affinity map that organized our findings and a journey map to understand the user flow. From there we created a persona, Lilian, whose perspectives we will demonstrate the journey from.

How do we design for collaborative travel during a trip where everyone can share and contribute?

DESIGN STUDIO

Journey map

Affinity map

USER PERSONA

Design & Prototyping

I conducted in-person usability testing on a specific user flow intended to point out best practices as well as any design flaws. Participants used paper prototypes depicting major screens of the mobile app. They were presented with specific tasks and scenarios (such as adding a segment to “Day 2” of the Japan Trip, adding a photo to the album section of the segment, “Fish Market,” share that photo on social media (Facebook, Instagram).