Swivel is a travel app that enables users to effortlessly collaborate on paired and group travel plans.
View Prototype.png)
UX Designer
4 weeks
December - January 2023
Miro
Figma & FigJam
Adobe CC
Google Suite
Procreate
Nicole Tierney*
Keauna Lyles
*We partnered for the research portion of this project then developed separate solutions/apps.
Travelers find it stressful to plan paired and group travel as it is difficult to ensure other’s expectations for accommodations and activities are being met.
Swivel is a collaborative travel planning app that allows users to easily add guests to their trip, and then browse, vote on potential accommodations and activities and view their collective matches.
Nicole and I hypothesized that our user would be the "group mom." Marion is planning a trip with 4 friends from college and needs to plan activities and lodging. Her primary pain points are making sure everyone is happy with her selections and splitting/tracking expenses as a group.
"More streamlined communication would be great in a group setting. It can be difficult in terms of making quick decisions so you're not going back and forth a bunch, asking a ton of questions and potentially missing out on something because it took too long for the group to decide."
- Mary, 29
"Too many people just makes planning and doing the activity too difficult. I would rather be in a small group than alone, but I would rather be alone than try to plan and do things with a large group."
- Sean, 31
After interviewing 6 people, we pulled out key user insights and placed them on sticky notes. We then organized the insights into groups in an affinity diagram. To further familiarize ourselves with our user, we empathy map, charting out Marion's feelings, thoughts and pain points.
We got to know Marion a bit at this point! I illustrated her using Procreate and Adobe CC, then noted some key markers of her personality. I even created a quote that we imagine this user saying.
We started by conducting 6 user interviews in order to learn how people plan for a vacation. We discovered that there was an opportunity to create a solution for group travel.
We found that the majority of our users found comfort in paired or group travel, but struggled to find one tool that made it simple to manage multiple budgets, diverse interests and shared accommodations.
At this point in the process, Nicole and I worked separately to create our own solutions to fit our user's needs.
During our user interviews, we discovered that 83% of our participants find meeting the expectations of their fellow travelers to be the most difficult part about paired/group travel planning.
Therefore, I believe that group travelers desire a less stressful way to collaborate with their travel companions and that I might help if I develop an app that facilitates decision-making for travel planning.
How might we simplify the planning collaboration process so that each our of users feel represented in their group’s choices for travel accommodations and activities?
I used the I like, I wish, what if ideation model to brainstorm potential solutions to solve my user's needs. Next I grouped these ideas into common themes. From there, I partnered with one of my former interviewees (1/6 of our user persona!) to user dot voting to select which of these groups resonated with them most.
From there, I mapped key features in the winning groups on a feature prioritization matrix to determine which features I would focus on first.
Swivel is a travel planning app that allows users to browse and vote on potential accommodations and activities with their chosen travel companion(s).
I created a user scenario, which developed into a user journey map. From there, I illustrated a storyboard using Procreate and Adobe CC to show the user, Marion, interacting with Swivel.
Link to Full Competitor Analysis
Link to Full User Flow
I started with paper sketches to quickly jot my ideas down without getting bogged down by visual details. Then I created low fidelity prototypes in Figma so that I can proceed with testing.
I tested my low fidelity prototype with 6 users and iterated between each test based on user's feedback and interactions with the app.
“This would be great for me and my wife. We have been putting off planning our next trip, this would make it easy.”
“It was all intuitive!”
“Which way do I swipe for yes again?”
“Oh, so Tinder rules? I get that. Makes sense. Swiping gives you a little dopamine hit.”
Although the 1st user completed each task with ease, I sensed they didn’t understand that they are browsing and voting with their trip mates. As I intended this to be the primary feature of the app, I continued to iterate the prototype until users highlighted the app’s features without prompting. I also added a clearer tutorial on which way to swipe for the voting screens.
I made several iterations between the 2nd and 5th version. Updates include moving non-matches to the bottom of the screen, lowering the opacity of non-matches, and putting the match details within an accordion section (with future iterations, the accordion would be collapsible). A success message was also added after the add trip mates screen to provide the user with feedback and understanding of the collaborative nature of the prototype.
I revisited this prototype a little over a year later, it still tested well, but I could tell there was a bit of confusion on the match screen with users. I took a note from my 1st love of ecommerce and added a 'sort by' dropdown and a filter. This better signaled to users that the default sort they are being shown is to list their matches first. I also added a slight tint to the non-matches to put additional emphasis on the matches.
At this point in my UX/UI education, we had only gone through UX Research so I only iterated my prototype to mid-fidelity during the 4 weeks I initially worked on this project. I later revisited this prototype a year later and increased fidelity, adding active/inactive states and finetuned my onboarding screens.
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