Perfect Place

PerfectPlace

A tool designed to help trip planners compare and evaluate their rental stay findings with ease.

This is an application concept I came up with for my capstone project with Springboard in Spring of 2022.

Thank you to my two mentors, Matthew Huggins and Barbara Ballard for guiding me throughout the project!

PerfectPlace is a browser tool concept that allows users to input URLs from various rental sites, enabling trip planners to evaluate, visually compare distances and amenities, comment on options, and vote on the best choice.

Role

UX Designer
(Solo Project)

Time

4 months (April-August) 2023

Tools

Adobe XD, Photoshop,
After Effects

Overview

Where are we staying?

Trip Planning is hard - and trip planning with others can get even harder.

I must admit, growing up I never thought that hard about how my parents managed to organize our family vacations - from booking hotel reservations to purchasing tickets to even navigating those road trips before Google Maps existed.

Only recently as an adult have I really begun to dip my toes into the world of trip planning - And answering the initial question “where will we stay?” was a great introduction to how difficult it can get.

In my experience, successfully communicating back and forth with trip members, saving locations of interest, and recalling everyone's thoughts was a lot less straightforward than I realized.

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Research & Findings

Narrowing 100 options to 1

Rental Booking sites often provide tools users need to filter available listings down by certain criteria. While this is the case, the capabilities of these tools are limited.

‍Aside from being able to filter your search and view listings on a map, the rest is up to the user to determine by reviewing each listing by themselves or with others.

I found that there doesn’t seem to be a tool that supports a user’s process of elimination individually or as a group effort to come to a decision - which arguably is one of the harder parts of trip planning.

Do other people struggle with this process too?

Trip Advisors say yes.

I first went online to learn about how people feel about this and what resources were out there - specifically with finding a place to stay online. While I couldn’t find an existing comparison tool, I instead found a countless amount of articles from people sharing their best tricks and strategies to find the best booking option.

So while I couldn’t find a statement that declared this was an issue, it was clear that there was some strategy required for this.

User Interviews

Tell me a Story about a Trip You Planned

To further my understanding of what this process looked like for others, I scoped out a few participants who could tell me about their personal experiences with booking stays online and what their methods are to eliminate their options, communicate with others, and maintain their priorities.

I interviewed 5 individuals who were screened to have some experience with trip planning and booking a stay online. I asked each participant to recall one trip and proceeded with my questions. I gained a lot of insight from these interviews. I learned about how their decisions were made and what factors they were keeping in mind during the process.

Affinity Mapping

So, How did they get from 100 options to 1?

After the interviews, I compiled together all of the quotes from my participants that captured key thoughts they had during their decision making process that helped qualify if a place could remain in the standing for options.

Key Findings

This confirmed to me that people did in fact need to narrow down their choices in a way that existing tools currently don’t help facilitate.

User Personas

Meet Irene, the adventure time initiator

Break____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Irene is going on a trip to San Diego with her friends. 🌴🛥️

What does her process look like?

How might we design a tool that helps trip planners evaluate, organize, and identify their best option together?

Feature Specification

Establishing an MVP to define necessary features

To establish what essential features were necessary to accomplish the goals/tasks for a potential user to identify a place to stay, I outlined a MVP (minimum viable product).

From there, I identified what key features I wanted to include to fulfill what is needed for the user.

Initial Stages & Explorations

Break____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Finding common ground between booking sites to establish a hierachy of information

To determine what information and how to lay out them out in the cards for effective comparing, I identified all amenities that were shared between four booking sites.

Ideation

Design Theme

I want the user to feel optimistic and the oppositie of overwhelmed.

I created a moodboard to capture the feeling and experience I wanted a potential user to have when using my app.

I liked the use of space and thin lines/text because it made the screen feel organized, clean, and not overwhelming. In regards to colors, I wanted to keep the application bright and use color meaningfully like some of the examples I found. For instance, one app uses different colors to represent different events on a calendar.

User Testing

Eliminating Assumptions

After creating my first prototype, I set out to test my tool on five participants. In my first round of testing, my main goals were to determine how intuitive the function of the display icons, comparing two findings, and map features were.

From these sessions, I discovered areas where participants struggled to complete tasks and learned why they experienced difficulty. Using their feedback, I made adjustments to the flow and UI to resolve these issues.

PerfectPlace

Final Design

Onboarding

Enter your findings

Users first enter their listing findings URLs, attractions they're interested being near, ideal dates of the trip, and more.

Compare your Options in the way that works for you

Users can explore their entered findings in the map and in detailed cards. The side nav bar stays present for refinement, additions and navigation.

Distance

Visualize & Compare Distances from Desired Attraction Points

Users can view the distance/time from any locations they're interested in being close to by selecting the attraction.

Record Comments and Pros/Cons to share with others

Users can view the comments left by other trip members and their own by visiting the 'Summary & Feedback' page.

Adjust Dates, Attractions, & Findings

Users can view the comments left by other trip members and their own by visiting the 'Summary & Feedback' page.

Review trip members thoughts and cast your vote

Users can view the comments left by other trip members and their own by visiting the 'Summary & Feedback' page.

Final Thoughts

If I were to continue this project, I would like to focus more on bringing more life to the social component of the app and making that more visible whether that be inviting wording or changing the location and colors of the button. I learned from my user testing that the social component is actually the highlight of the tool so I would even consider bringing those features out in the main display instead of being hidden at first.

I also feel that the best application of this tool would be as an add-on to an existing booking site like Airbnb or Vrbo. This way the user can still access the search features to find additional places and have a more whole, complete experience from the start of searching to the end of finding their most ideal listing.

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