Groupcation is a project that I founded and have been working on for the past several years. Whilst working at a travel agency, I noticed a lot of pain points from customers regarding the organization and shareability of their travel plans. Groupcation became the solution I came up with from the user data that I had collected over the course of the experience.
At its core, the app is a trip organizer that allows you to reference all your travel details into a ‘Groupcation’. Users can invite people into their ‘Groupcation’, they can join others, or simply seek inspiration from the trending trips near them.
Understanding the target audience was a key factor into the design and layout decisions that were made. From choosing the perfect shade of color to the corner radius’ of the logo, everything was carefully curated to create a pleasant user experience.
Groupcation was designed with flexibility in mind. It had to be able to be used by older people on mobile who are not tech-savvy, and it also had to cater to the large-scale travel agents on their desktops with hundreds of rows of data.
It was a difficult decision to prioritize one segment of the audience over the other; so in the end it became a balancing act of finding a happy medium. The app had to be designed with accessibility in mind over the needs of a power user, as during travel it was important to have at least the important trip data at the ready.
The goal in mind was to make each Groupcation into a central hub where the most used tools in travel planning are all kept together for quick access.
After extensive user research, I concluded some of the most important actions travelers need to do during the trip planning phase and baked them into the app:
A basic itinerary view replaces the spreadsheet where most organize their plans. Sending messages and money to other travelers was also critical.
Further research indicated the need to add basic information about the destination to save user’s time from tedious online searches. Finally, a centralized location where everyone can upload their photos and videos was also added to save time from requesting and sending media from other travelers.
Before wireframing the product, I planned out all the possible metadata that would be associated with each User. This allowed me to architect the layout based on the amount of dynamic information that would be displayed.
It started off pretty simple with the User data model, however, things really started to snowball and became convoluted once I had to list out all the information that each service in a Groupcation would show. Decisions had to be made based on what is relevant to show in the limited amount of screen real estate and what data should be kept private and not shown for security reasons.
To help with this, I used the data from competitors and user research to eliminate unnecessary information and added fields which would help relieve some pain points for the consumer.
