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People might run into many problems when they are making collaborative decisions during travel planning. For example, they might have disagreements, or none of them want to take responsibility. Lots of difficulties would make the process of travel planning much harder than it should be. For this project, we want to solve the problems that might happen during traveling and collaborative travel planning.
How do people collaborate in the travel planning phase?
We would like to conduct research to understand travelers’ collaborative decision-making process, especially the challenges they face and how they deal with them. For this purpose, we decided to first conduct experiential and informational background research.
We collected 5 papers about planning and traveling, researched some Reddit posts on /r/travel wiki about what people value when they are making travel plans, and shared experiential observations regarding students who traveled during spring break.
Based on our insights, we got a sense of how people travel, and we wanted to collect answers to basic travel planning questions we wanted to focus so that we could understand more about the context and re-frame the scope of our research question.
Based on our previous research, we re-define our project objectives into:
We conducted storytelling interview on three college students who had traveling experiences in the past year. We asked the participants to describe their last group travel plan process and walked through the tools they used as well as problems they encountered. After that
Based on our primary research and secondary research, we synthesized them into several models including Stakeholder Map, Customer Journey Map, Empathy Map, and finally we used Affinity Diagram to analyze our interview data. We then started our ideation phase by Crazy 8, and we turned our ideas into storyboards for speed dating.
We first combined all the individual stakeholder map to analyze who are involved in the trip planning process. This helped us to find value flow and potential opportunities for specific stakeholders.
We first combined all the individual stakeholder map to analyze who are involved in the trip planning process. This helped us to find value flow and potential opportunities for specific stakeholders.
We also created a customer journey map to analyze the steps that the users undertake and what kinds of challenges they will run into in each step. The reason why we chose this map was because we thought that collaborative decision making is a step by step process.
Finally, based on the interview result, we used affinity diagramming to categorize insights from the users.
In this phase, we first generated ideas using Crazy 8 so that we could vote the top three ideas and turn them into storyboards. Using the storyboards, we conducted speed dating to get feedback on our early stage ideas from the users.
Young travelers are eager for trusted recommendations from friends and the Internet. Recommendation is an important source that helps them to make decisions.
Time is important indication of whether or not people should start preparing for a trip. It also promotes consensus between travelers and defines roles for each person.
Most of the people showed high inclination towards collaboration in trip planning. Also, our research suggests that everyone’s preferences, goals, and opinions should be reflected in the plan.
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An algorithm that generates recommended destination attractions for travelers based on previous travelers.
A plugin that take in important and customized features of a place or a thing the users like/want to go or do from a webpage or chat box and generate information on a notepad.
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A pop-up Timeline Reminder that gently reminds young travelers to make group plans in case they miss out on great prices or limited tickets and admissions.
Something I learned...
Learn my teammates before the project: As one of the most active members of this team, I gradually learned how to communicate with my teammates to cooperate with them. Because we all had some differences in the speed of completing assignments or the way of working, knowing each other better would help me to distribute tasks and to negotiate.
Throughout the process, I learned how important it is to find the balance between generating quick ideas and develop deeper thoughts. In many tasks such as brainstorming or task distribution, I was able to quickly generate possible ideas, but I also realized how important it is to think deeper and weigh the pros and cons of an idea in those process.
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