RoadWise
A road trip planner from A to Z.
Project Overview
All-in-One Road Trip Planner: Comprehensive tool for planning every aspect of your journey.
Customization: Tailor your trip to suit your preferences and needs.
Budget-Friendly Options: Find affordable transportation and accommodations to create a cost-effective road trip tailored to your budget.
Ease of Booking: Book cars or RVs, accommodations, activities, and tickets online effortlessly.
Flexible Adjustments: Modify your plans on the go to adapt to changing conditions.
Smooth Experience: RouteWise ensures a hassle-free, personalized road trip from start to finish.
RouteWise is a hypothetical comprehensive online road trip planner that offers customizable and budget-friendly travel options.
1- Pre-Trip Planning:
It streamlines the planning process from start to finish, allowing you to book vehicles, accommodations, activity spots, and tickets all in one place.
The platform provides cost assessments, customizable travel plans, and real-time pricing updates tailored to your preferences.
Plan your route based on your interests and book attractions (stops) and accommodations (stays) in advance.
2- User Guidance During the Trip:
RouteWise keeps you informed with real-time road alerts, including weather forecasts and accident updates.
Adjust your plans as needed throughout your journey.
After your trip, you can share your travel diary online to relive and celebrate your adventures with friends.
Target Users
Package Users:
Individuals looking for a comprehensive travel experience who want to book a complete package including vehicle rental, route planning, accommodations, and activities.
Vehicle Renters:
People specifically interested in reserving a vehicle for their trip, who may want to customize their travel plans around their choice of transportation.
Accommodation Seekers:
Users focused on finding and booking suitable accommodations for their stay, whether for a single night or the entire trip, and may also be interested in planning their journey around these reservations.
Activity Planners:
Travelers interested in discovering and booking activities along their route, aiming to enrich their journey with engaging experiences and adventures.
Note: Given the limited time available, we considered pre-trip planning as a single package for this case study.
This is a project I worked on while studying at UX-Land School. I collaborated with my colleagues as both a UX researcher and a UI designer.
Due to time constraints, we focused on pre-trip planning as a package. I conducted interviews to understand user needs and contributed to designing a simple platform for customizing and booking road trips. The goal was to make travel planning easy and efficient for users by following these value propositions of business:
Note: In this case study, we concentrated on designing the website for the first target groups
My Role
Designe Thinking
Discover
To understand the users' pain points and develop effective solutions, we employed a comprehensive research approach that consisted of the following methods:
Competitive Analysis
Survey
Interview & Affinity Diagram
Cart Sorting
Interview
This task is a packaged part of the website and should be divided into four main parts: Road, Vehicle, Activities, and Accommodation.
Affinity Diagram
Competitive Analysis
We evaluated eight websites related to road trips, campsites, and RVs, examining fourteen key features. Our analysis revealed that Road Tripper was the most competitive, while Outdoorsy and Wanderlog excelled in affordability and customization. Leveraging these insights, we designed a new website to address existing pain points and capitalize on opportunities for enhancement.
Cart Sorting
Some of the observations from Competitive analysis had a direct impact on the contents of the cards that we were creating. Based on the insights gained from the competitive evaluation, we made necessary modifications to the card contents to enhance their effectiveness and relevance.
Then we worked on Cards and their contents again, based on a re-evaluation of the competitive analysis.
We decided to conduct our card sorting using the Optimal Workshop platform. This choice significantly simplified our work, as it enabled us to view the results categorized based on different criteria. For instance, we could easily identify the Categories assigned to each Card and observe the Cards designated for each Category.
Survey
To better understand our target audience and their challenges, we created an online survey and shared it with relevant communities. Within a few days, we received 46 submissions. Based on the responses, we identified four common pain points, which guided our next steps.
Intuitive and user-friendly UX/UI design / Design optimization for improved user engagement
Customizable design elements
Accessibility and inclusivity considerations
Website/App responsiveness
We prefer side roads over main roads and highways for the first two reasons that we enjoy the scenery on the side roads from the villages.
Facilities on the road and road safety are very important to me; I don't prefer remote places.
To choose the route, we always try to make the departure route different from the return route so that we can benefit from different tourist attractions.
Size/ amenities /reliability. It's important to have a
a vehicle that suits my needs and can handle different terrains.The experience of traveling with an RV car is different because the speed of movement is different, there are restrictions on entering some cities depending on the dimensions of the car and the height, but it is good because wherever you get tired, you have the basic facilities to rest.
Facility of campsite
The opinions of users are very decisive about any sightseeing place of the hotel and restaurant.
A series of information, including emergency contact details, medical information, and information about repair shops suitable for the specific car, is very important and necessary.
Checking the type of facilities for stopping is very important and crucial for me.
Tedious search for suitable dining options and the difficulty in finding places that align with our preferences.
What I expect from an online platform is to show a list of the best places to visit based on my interests and save my time.
Show me the busy and peak times of a place, whether it is a natural location or a historical point of interest, such as museums, etc.
Accomadation
Road
Vehicle
Activities
Define
Our team created a persona for our new project based on the personality traits of the target user, such as Nina Wilson, a busy 35-year-old Designer from Portland who values budget & time in the road trip experience. By tailoring our design decisions to meet her needs and preferences, we can create an engaging and effective user experience that resonates with users like Nina.
Persona
Site Map
To ensure our information architecture meets user expectations, we conducted 16 open card sorting using the Optimal Workshop platform. After the initial exercise, we developed our first version and iteratively refined it based on user testing and competitive analysis.
Here is our final site map and in this case study, we have concentration on the 'Cakes' Section:
We added a customization task to the user flow for personalized packages, providing a seamless experience for busy professionals like Nina.
Final User Flow
Develop
Challenges
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solutions
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx : ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXXXXXXX: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXXXXXXXX: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXXXXX: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sketches and Wireframes
We initially mapped out our ideation using hand-sketched low-fidelity wireframes, aiding communication within the team during the early design stages. Later, we transitioned to creating low-fidelity wireframes on Figma to visualize page layouts and design direction. These wireframes underwent several iterations before final content development.
Moodboard
UI Kit
Our UI kit balances casualness with a color palette of dark & light green, light orange & brown tones, modern and easy-to-read fonts.
Deliver
High Fidelity Wireframe
Protoype
Here is the last prototype, displaying what we've achieved through our design process.
Iteration and Usability Test
Throughout the project, we went through multiple iterations, driven by the insights we gained from usability tests. These tests were instrumental in shaping our decisions and constantly enhancing our project.
