Have you ever experienced this?
You happens to have a couple of days off from your work, and you plan to travel to another city to get yourself chill, you LOVE traveling, but you hate doing all the research about where to go and what to eat. Every time thinking about the preparation, you just found yourself less excited for the trip...
Users will easily access vital attraction recommendations, optimal transit plans, useful local evaluations, and most importantly, a memorable Chengdu tour experience through Tripanda.
Take a quick glance of Chengdu culture and our service content
A well-planned three themed trips! For each trip, you will have the essential attractions suggestions and navigation plans
We provide the latest information you need to know about one attraction, as well as its local reviews
Unlock unique collectibles by visiting various attractions. Each collectible has a specific connection with its corresponded attraction
Craft your personalized map as a memorable souvenir while you travel
Your achievement map can be printed out and mailed it to yourself! This slow-mail postcard will take years to arrive, be ready for the surprise from yourself
The problem we are trying to solve:
When planning for a trip, it’s difficult to discover things in a very novel place especially in a city you have never been to.
Ultimate Impact:
Users will be able to easily access vital attraction recommendations, optimal transit plans, useful local evaluations, and most importantly, a memorable Chengdu tour experience.
How Might We:
How might we simplify the pre-trip research while providing enough information to localize the travel experience
First, before touching anything related to design, I wanted to dive into the background of the city. Based on our research,
1. Chengdu has become one of the driving forces in the global outbound tourism industry.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/domestic-tourist-prefecture-level-city/cn-domestic-tourist-sichuan-chengdu
2. There was a huge social media traction around this city. Chengdu was the second most popular city in China with 4.03 billion likes on Tiktok.
http://www.21jingji.com/article/20211027/herald/d61a0472d335b0b7d9763f51c8fbe914.html
3. Among the inbound tourists, tourists aged from 25 to 44 took the biggest share of 49.9%.
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/tourism/2018statistics/
Although I saw from secondary research and competitive research that my potential target audience and potential service they need, I wanted to hear firsthand my target audience’s experiences to cater the final product toward their needs, I wanted to hear it from the user themselves.
So with eight participants of a variety of ages, between 25 - 49 as we mentioned in our secondary research, I asked them the questions below to find some trends in their travel behaviors. Question likes
1. How often do you travel?
2. What is the goal of traveling?
3. What do you prepare for the trip?
4. How do you prepare for the trip?
5. What would you like to do while traveling ?
(top attractions, activities, etc.)
6. What is your traveling style?
(fast pace / slow pace)
And with these insights, I organized all my data through an affinity map. I took their quotes and put them together trying to find like trends together eventually forming nine main insights and three main themes.
With the aspect of what my interviewees look for when traveling, I found that my interviewee preferred a slow-paced of traveling style with a localized travel plan.
INSIGHTS
My interviewees prefered a slow paced of traveling style with localized travel plan
How Might We simplify the pre-trip research while providing enough information to localize the travel experience
Moving forward to the design. Based on the feedback and insights from the research, I came out with these opportunities to solve their pain points.
· Predesign itinerary and themes
· Highlights essential activities on map
· Up-to-date guides & reviews from locals & tourists
After determining the general direction, my teammate Bruce drew a storyboard to help us visualize how users interact with our product. This storyboard contains the previously mentioned pain points and how we use our product to solve their pain points.
In this stage, we researched and listed a bunch of attractions and must-visit locations and filtered out locations and attractions with a cross diagram. We wanted the itinerary to feel both open and cultural.
Secondly, we put the location we already filter on the Chengdu map and set a main region of the itinerary. We were carefully picking the region based on the distance between each location and the availability of public transportation because we don’t want our users to spend too much time on transportation.
Finally, putting together the location and the main region, we map out the itinerary.
Mood boards are a great way to simulate the effects of color on the users who are using our products. Here we choose a lighter color, with cyan as the main color and apricot as the alternate color because scientifically these colors can help people to be calm and relaxed.
It then came to a big topic. My teammate and I were having a big debate about whether we should land our product in E-map format or an analog format. Each of the formats has its own pros and cons, for example for E-Map, it’s easy to navigate and it’s portable. But it feels less immersive especially since people nowadays use apps to solve everything. For the analog map, itself is a souvenir, but it is not user-friendly for people with no sense of direction, and it is hard to carry around on a trip.
But, who said we could only do it in one way? Let’s keep it a secret for a moment and we will talk about that later in the process.
The three days three themes were what we predesign the itinerary regarding a specific theme of that day. For example, on the first day, we prepare a theme of the teahouse culture. There will be two main attractions relative to the cultures. In addition, we also took the time to research what are the optimal transportation methods when going between each stop.
With our main features settled, we started developing UI sketches for each feature. These concept sketches helped us figure out the low-fidelity wireframes for our app. Moreover, it gave us a sense of how our initial user flow would look like.
We developed these mid-fidelity wireframes to figure out where functionalities would appear, and how the different screens would be connected. We decided to create some more detailed wireframes to experiment with icons and different typefaces.
Do you still remember the easten egg hunt we mention in the earlier about how we are going to use both platform to enhance the overall experience for our users?
The third day will have a special places to go to: a post office. In there, Daniel, our persona, will be able to print out a postcard that has the places he visited in the past few days and leaved some words for himself. But, the postcard is different from a usually one. Daniel will take at least one year to receive the postcard from the time he send it, or he can tell the clerk how many years he wants to receive the postcard, the time can be up to 10 years.
Answer: For Memory + A Delay of Gratification
Many individuals, I believe, like to bring home some souvenirs from their travels. They could be small items purchased at a local store, images taken there, or experiences imprinted in their minds. We hope that this slow-mailing postcard will become a part of your future memories as well. What you write on the postcard, whether it's your feelings about the place or your current mood, will become part of your journey. When you receive the postcard years later, whether you were just as busy at the time or have changed your pace of life, the postcard will help you remember the calm and comfort you experienced during the trip, for both the city and the country.
I am very grateful to my team for producing so much content in only four weeks. Everyone in the team was actively participating and discussing in each stage, and everyone's ideas and questions made the whole project more polished and reasonable.
Tripanda's initial concept was to provide a simple experience: we would dress up as tour guides and prepare travel suggestions for users ahead of time. As each stage is completed, we ask ourselves, "What makes Tripanda unique if we're just giving our users a walkthrough?" Tripanda should not only provide navigation and price range like Yelp, Google Maps, and TripAdvisor, but also be like when users are holding a map and self-exploring in a specific guiding situation (the quality experience we have filtered), gaining a multi-layer of story senses and accomplishment.
That's why we added a feature of a slow-mail postcard at the end. Any souvenir is better than one's own memories, which is also what we explained in the goal at the beginning, so that users can also recall their own experience many years later about the feeling of living in the slow-paced city of Chengdu. As a next step, we wish to develop similar products for different cities around the world as this pandemic comes to an end and tourism returns to our sight.
Thank you for stopping by!
I'm Chloe, a logical interaction designer who is dedicated to discovering the future of human interaction language and experience by merging my strong visual design skills with design thinking.
