How I designed GoTrip, a social networking app for solo travelers | UI/UX case study

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.” — Saint Augustine

Almost all of us haven’t been able to go on a vacation for such a long time due to the pandemic and during this period, many of us have gone through anxiety attacks, heartbreaks, routine or unusual emotional breakdowns, and whatnot. We went through all of this in the same house where all our pre-pandemic memories live, so definitely no way of escaping it anyhow.

We understand the need for something so fundamental once we abstain from it. We understand how getting out of the house once in a while affected our work, body, and mind, whether that be a world trip or just a small walk. We understand more clearly now that how it provided us emotional stability.

As the severe condition settles down, the very first thing we’d wanna do is go out and play. Yes! But we might not be having all the cool people viz. our friends and family aligned with our plans and dates. What might we do then?

Disclaimer: This case study is just a concept of a product that is solely owned by me, and is not owned by any other individual or organization. All of the images used in the project have been picked from unsplash.com featuring various authors. I used this concept for nothing but only to brush up my skills as a designer.

What is GoTrip?

GoTrip is a mobile app made for solo travelers and couples to enhance their experience of traveling. The name “GoTrip” itself is inspired by the same idea, that people do not have to make it a hardcore mind-work to plan out a trip instead, all the work should be saved for the real adventure that would likely happen on the trip.

GoTrip allows you to socialize with other solo travelers going to the same destination as yours at the same time. Hence, motivating them to go out and travel even if they cannot find a partner or convince their friends and family for the trip.

Features:

• Curates your experience and trip suggestions over time.
• Easy to find interests and connect with people.
• Like a profile to see their stories, posts before anyone.
• Easy to search places and find groups.
• Post your trip in less than 2 minutes.
• Look for all the things you’d like to do in any city, filtered by your trip type and budget.

So, without many bullets let’s drop right into the details and process.

Inspiration

COVID-19 has become a life-changing phase for all of us. It has changed the way we think and live. For a considerable amount of time now we are not the same as what we somehow were used to. The pandemic has affected the economical sectors, and the tourism industry being the major one.

Solo traveling has been a matter of doubt for a lot of people, especially those who have not done it. Usually, they are curious but are too confused and somewhat scared as well to give it a shot.

Considering the losses that the tourism industry has faced recently, solo trips could be one of the ways to fill up the demand that has risen lately among people due to their monotonous life cycles.

Therefore, I tried to conceptualize GoTrip by considering all the above factors i.e. macro and micro impacts on the economy and people, and an initiative to advertise solo trips as a reliable option for the people who had been too scared to step-a-foot ahead.

Research

Quantitative (Surveys)

I created a google form and spread it among friends, via WhatsApp and Telegram groups to get an overview of what could be the fundamental needs and check if my assumptions were parallel to the problems faced by users while planning a solo/duo trip.

And here are the stats gathered from 68 responses.

What I found out?

• Only 10% of people had been on a solo trip.
• A quite number of people wanted to go on a solo trip but were hesitant for many reasons.
• People were comfortable on a duo trip just as they were in a group of people.
• A majority of people love traveling, either quite often or once in a while
• New Information: More number of people were actually in doubt that they might feel too lonely after some time along the trip rather than any other reason.

Qualitative (Interviews)

For interviews, I made a list of 10 people, all of them were either my friends or friends of friends. I randomly picked people and made sure that all of them were not hardcore travelers, instead they were diverse with different opinions and lifestyles.

My aim for interviews was to find out if the quantitative survey results could have a subjective meaning and what else was yet to be validated.

The list of open-ended questions I prepared went something like this:

• How often do you travel in a year and for what purposes?
• Who would you like to travel with the most for a fun trip, just you, family, friends, or somebody else?
• If you ever been on a solo trip, what were the problems that you faced?
• What problems do you think a person might face along a solo trip?
• What were the things that you hoped you knew before going on that one trip when you’ve been disappointed with the experience?
• Do you think India is a safe place to have a solo trip for anyone from outside or from the country itself who has not traveled much in their life?
• What precautions would you take or suggest someone willing to go on a solo trip?

These were the major questions that were followed by a few other questions for different candidates.

Below are the insights that I gathered from their answers.

Insights

• The majority of people usually travel once a year for fun, apart from business or college. And surprisingly half of them told that they’d enjoy a solo trip over any other but could never afford it or couldn’t manage to do it.
• It came out as new information that people are worried about getting scammed on a solo trip by local vendors of that place. They had insecurities of being robbed and many other disturbing things due to which they found solo trips a bit too risky and unsafe.
• Candidates admitted on the talk that they wish they knew about the best places to visit and to eat at a particular place they went to so that they didn’t have to regret later that they missed out on something huge, which most of them did.
• They gave their personal opinions about traveling in India and said that there are a lot of scammers in the country that especially target foreigners and amateur students/young adults. They suggested that for amateur travelers it's better to have complete knowledge about the locale before actually going there and exploring the place.

Competitive Analysis

The three main apps in the industry for solo traveling are Tripoto, Travel Buddy & Travello.

Though, the feature set and main goals of GoTrip but different from any of these three, there were still a lot of things in common that been be taken into consideration. So, I juxtaposed these products to see what main features are missing that could be added to enhance the experience and fulfill the user-needs from the POV of GoTrip.

The pain points found are as follows:

• Doesn’t have much information about places.
• If you want your partner/spouse to include in the trip, you need to join them by a different account, so no ‘couple mode’ available.
• Apps don’t tell users how to get to a particular city.
• Doesn’t have any pre-declaration about budgets.
• Some users found the interfaces of these apps quite difficult to navigate through.
• Can’t share posts, places, restaurants, etc directly in the chats.
• Holiday suggestions are not useful.

Personas

I considered fictionalizing two people who were in fact, from the same age group but had different needs. I did this so I could understand the extreme possible cases that may come up while using the app. Here are the two personas with different goals, wants, and frustrations.

User Stories

For user stories, I made four epics with the story format “As a ______, I want to _____ so I can _____”

These epics were then further broken down to other stories which illustrated what the user wanted and how it could help them with other problems directly or indirectly.

User Flows

The two major operations that are needed to be done through the app are posting a new trip and joining a trip. The rest of the other operations are based on these two only. In other words, all the other options are dependent on these two options.

So here are the flows of how a user will possibly join a new trip and post a new trip, from start till the end.

Information Architecture

The goal of IA is to help users in finding information and complete tasks. It is most of the time, an outcome of card sorting. In my process, the information had to be structured in such a way that users can easily navigate through the app and find interests suitable to their needs.

Here is a basic information architecture that shows how a user can navigate to some of the major screens in the app.

Wireframes (aka Initial Designs)

There are numerous things whose feasibility can be analyzed while they are being designed. But, even before that pen and paper is an extremely helpful medium to get a rough physical idea of how screens would actually look before making them land directly on the design canvas.

I created low-fidelity wireframes of some major screens, and here they are.

Color and Type

Used SF Pro Display+Open Sans so that readability and legibility of the text is maintained throughout the brand. SF Pro Display already had its remarkable history in the field of typefaces and is well known for its simplicity and beauty.

Final Designs

I know you’ve been waiting for these, and they are finally here 😇

Home Screen

I have made use of vertical cards to show interests as they were able to hold a lot of information that could not be accommodated in square or horizontal cards of standard aspect ratios. I also made sure that I only keep major and relevant info, rest to be saved for expanded mode.

Expanded Cards

As user taps on a card, it expands to show all the information, including description and tags along with a call to action for sending requests.

Search screens

This screen has a basic search bar with a placeholder and a button, followed by search history and trending searches. Users can filter and sort the results appearing based on their needs. The interest results appear in the form of horizontal cards.

Chats

Chat screen accommodates all the joined groups in a queue and they come up and go down in the queue based on the activity.

Liked Items

There are two states for liked item screen, empty and non-empty state. Empty states also tells the user how they can make that list a non-empty state. As soon as users start liking items, they start to appear on the list.

Post a trip and profile

‘My trips’ screen has a main CTA to post an interest for a trip which the user is planning. It is further expanded to a form in which details can be easily filled and be posted. In the ‘Profile’ page, there are two buttons available, one to initiate uploading a post and another one to update a story.

Places

Cities can be seen in a complete window, which will have a little description about it, followed by buttons that will have their specific sections and photos and interests.

More about places

Users can filter down places they want to and stay in a certain city based on their budget. It has also appeared in the form of horizontal cards, each card has a place’s name, ratings, and few important buttons like information, direction, like and share.

Stories

Every user will have the option to post a public or a private story. When a story is private, it will only be seen to those people who have liked the author’s profile. Any story other than that is a public story i.e, it will be visible to everyone around the world.

Onboarding screens

These screens tell users about some of the best things they can do with the help of this app. Users can either go through these screens or they can altogether skip them.

Verification

Users cannot post or join any trip in the app unless they have verified their identity. However, they can always browse through the various trips and places in the app. This screen comes right after onboarding screen/sign up screen but they can always skip this process for some other time.

Sign Up, Log In and Customization

Authentication with phone number makes this platform even more secure for travelers. The user can always call for help to their nearest police station in case of any emergency and mobile number authentication makes the incidents more traceable and findable.

Conclusion

This project helped me understand the Design Thinking process more accurately. I came to know more about how important it is as a designer to empathize with users and understand their needs. Some of my assumptions were discarded after the research process as I came to know that it didn’t have any meaning and were completely different from user needs.

Overall my main focus was to illustrate this concept. I believe with such help from technology, the tourism industry could get a boom in the economy along with more happy and mindful tourists 😇

By the way, you can give 50 claps on this article, just try holding that clap button.

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