Making travel planning smarter with Eatsploration

Eatsploration

Making travel planning smarter for curious explorers.

Project Overview

This journey began with the general questions of "What do we all do when planning where to go? Where to eat? Where to get food from that is interesting, one-of-a-kind, gram-worthy and authentically local?".

During the initial planning phase, I thought about the planning process of a passionate foodie or travelling food gourmands. Through a wide survey, I found that it doesn't matter if you have nonchalant views of food or if you would travel just for food, we all go through the same thought and research process when asked: "What are we eating?"

I suspect that people do want to experience it all but they don't have time to pour through websites looking for reviews/ recommendations to compare ratings, prices, value for money, location and deliciousness. They often do not have the time to leaf through websites searching for restaurants or local dining spots to incorporate into their itinerary.

Details

Role: UX/UI Designer

Client: General Assembly Final UX Assignment

Tools: AdobeXD, Canva, Miro

The Goal

Understanding behaviours, needs and frustrations of a travel itinerary planner.

The Task

Develop a smart planning tool for passionate foodies or travelling food gourmands.

See my prototype

Target Audience

For a more inclusive business modal, I did not want to only limit the benefits of this tool to only foodies but created a product that fits all.

The target audience is research savvy but time poor working professionals that experiences FOMO while travelling. They're independent, open-minded and curious, trying to squeeze in as many authentic, delicious and unique food experiences during their travels.

User Research and Interviews

To further understand Eatsploration’s target audience, I’ve interviewed a mix of users with varying levels of interest in food, all were professionals in their field with varying lifestyles and personalities.

Research points:

Research process - Pre and post travel procedures
Their travel planning tool
Their best travel experience
The good, the bad and the can-be-better elements their current travel planning process
Their level of trust with food and travel reviews and how easily are they persuaded
Their sharing channel – who do they tell, how to they tell it and where do they tell it
Willingness to build a food and travel-based community

Affinity Mapping

Post interviews, I found that their thoughts and actions can be grouped in these 8 patterns.

I found that users invest a lot of their time and effort in the research and decision-making process. Users with a lower level of interest in food were not exempt from this process as they too went through the research pattern with very similar platforms.

Trust was an interesting topic of conversation and our team that conducted the interviews noted that they had spent more time than intended on the topic as two different patterns started to emerge from the topic.

The User Process

The users went through the same process when planning for their trip itinerary and this diagram shows the grouping of research channels, social media, and methods of recording their findings. This process is repeated for every single review/ recommendation and place of visit in their trip.

Research Insights

These quotes from the user interviews struct a chord with me and I've summarised them to these 3 key insights that I refer back to during the design process.

A self-curated itinerary makes for deeper emotional connections to a location and food experiences
Trust comes from knowing the person and knowing if they're a match to your lifestyle or taste bracket
Need for better transparency and a better matching system

There is also a paradox that emerged from users preferring sites with only user generated reviews. Those are the users that jumps more often from one site to another to validate reviews that they most resonate with.

User Goals

To have fun and interesting food experiences as part of their travel itinerary

To have a list of restaurants/ hawkers/ markets that is well researched and trustable by other like-minded foodies
To not have to spend a lot of time with searching and compiling the list of places to visit

Motivational Factors

FOMO on food experiences native to the country they’re traveling to

Bragging rights of having been there and done that
Experiencing different cultures and cuisine

Key Summary

Travellers need a way to get a well researched and verified list of food recommendations that is interesting and fun without having to spend a lot of time on researching and compiling because they want to experience authentic and interesting food adventures at the place they’re travelling in.

Driving engagement and content by utilising our foodies' wealth of knowledge.

Competitor Comparative Analysis

During the course of the interview, I found that there were two pools of users - three of the users preferred user generated reviews while 2 others preferred editorial styled content.

TripAdvisor, Google, and Zomato were repeatedly mentioned by all of the users.

Based on that, I've selected the 5 platforms here to conduct the competitor analysis. Broadsheet was also mentioned but as their articles are Australian based only, we have not chosen them to be part of the comparison. Culture trip was added despite it not mentioned by the users - as they rank highly when searching for food experiences.

Feature Comparison Matrix

Although TripAdvisor and Zomato seem to be the platforms of choice for user-generated reviews of restaurants and where to eat in different cities, both run on the same principle of everything for everyone. Some users felt that the sites were overloaded with too much information and they're often overwhelmed with the one too many categories.

Comments about editorial style sites such as Time Out where users felt that they couldn't trust the writers are they felt the writers may be writing just in favour of advertising restaurants. On the other hand, users that preferred editorially written content mentioned that they would tend to trust TIme Out as the writers are professionals in their field and are more equipped to write about food.

User Persona

User Flow 1

I've created a preliminary user flow would take visitors from the main landing page where they can key in their destination, explore the submitted articles, add recommendations to their list and proceed to share it with their friends.

Prioritisation Matrix

Sketches

Low-Fidelity Prototype

The design is intentionally kept clean with highlights of the brand colour yellow to make key functionalities stand out. Images are kept to a minimum with bold headlines selling the recommendations.

Usability Testing

The prototype was tested with a group of 4 users with the task of creating an itinerary for a Spain trip.

There were 5 key improvement areas that had to be amended post-testing.

Key Changes to Low-Fidelity Prototype

During the testing phase, I ran into some challenges such as:

By keeping the design and images to a minimum, there was significant scrolling that needed to be done for long-format posts and that created a level of disinterest. In this day and age, who wants to read page after page of content?
Also, by keeping images to a minimum in the carousel article feature images space, there was confusion with users expecting the article to change to reflect the different images.
Users also had to keep scrolling to get to the important Bookmarking of the recommended places to add to their list.
The "Share my list" function was really quite clunky and did not live up to our statement of allowing users to customize or plan their itinerary. At this point, it looked more like a sharing function.
There was no way for clients to have a viewing list that is personalised to their itinerary planning.

These 5 key screen revisions had to be amended post-testing.

Removal of carousel header images
Changed article formats - Broken them up with images in between
Changed location order of the bookmarking of "Places"
Redesigned "Share My List" to enable better customisation of trip itinerary
Addition of Filter function to improve article selection for users' preference

Revised User Flow

With the amendments made to the wireframe, I've also revised the User Flow that included an Onboarding experience for sign-ups, a profile page that leads to the story publishing function, article filters, article author view and edit trip list page.

High-Fidelity Prototype: Key Features

In summary, I’ve created Eatsploration with these 3 key features that focus on the behaviours and needs of a travel itinerary planner.

Explore and Discover

Users will be able to explore and discover what to eat and explore in the destination of their choice AND get to know the author. This helps the users better understand the authors' travel patterns and food preferences.

Save and Create

Next key feature is Save and Create which enables users to save a recommended place to their trip list and customize their list with details before sharing.