Travel app with clear trip flow and personalization
Developing the Personalized Travel Summary Feature
Project Summary
Yandex Travel is a service for planning and booking trips, used by over 20 million people monthly. As part of the project, a feature for personalized travel summaries was developed, designed to impress users with a quality trip recap, prolong warm memories, and encourage users to share their experiences on social media.
The project was carried out as a real task from Yandex Travel during my six-month training at Yandex Practicum, with a primary focus on in-depth UX research conducted both in team and individual settings.
Key Achievements of the Project:
- Increased user engagement through the implementation of the summary feature.
- Enhanced sharing of memories via integration with social media.
- Reduced time spent on creating travel recaps, thereby increasing user satisfaction.
- Improved user retention through regular reminders of past trips via push notifications.
Note: These metrics are expected, as the platform has not provided relevant data following the implementation of this feature.
Introduction
As part of the project, a functionality for personalized travel summaries was developed for the Yandex Travel service. This feature aims to create an engaging and convenient experience for users, allowing them to preserve memories of their trips and share them with friends. The core idea is to provide users not only with factual information about their journeys but also with visual and emotional elements that help them relive their experiences and inspire new travels.
Role in the Project
In the project, I served as the designer, responsible for user research, hypothesis formulation, prototype design, and testing. By collaborating with the team, I gathered and analyzed data, developed interface concepts, and ensured usability testing.
Project Tasks
- Conduct user research to identify needs and preferences.
- Develop the functionality of personalized travel summaries, including visual and textual elements.
- Design usage scenarios and entry points for the new functionality.
- Implement a sharing mechanism for travel summaries on social media and messaging platforms.
- Conduct usability testing of prototypes to enhance the user experience.
Research
Methodology
The aim of the research was to identify user preferences regarding the preservation and sharing of travel memories. Key tasks included exploring the formats of travel summaries, interest in viewing others' reports, and the convenience of combining planning and memory storage functions. The following methods were utilized:
- Qualitative methods: Interviews and focus groups to gain a deep understanding of user experiences.
- Quantitative methods: Online surveys to gather statistically significant data.
- Usability testing: Evaluation of the interface's ease of use for the new feature.
Qualitative Research
Hypotheses
- Users prefer visual travel summaries instead of text.
- Personal details and preferences should be considered in travel summaries.
- Users prefer visual travel summaries instead of text.
- The user is interested in travel results that highlight their unique experience.
- It will be convenient for the user to plan trips and store photos about them in one application.
- Users prefer to receive push notifications that remind them of previous trips
- Lack of privacy settings may discourage users from sharing travel results.
Sample
- Men and women aged 20-44
- Travel at least twice a year
- Last trip taken within the last 3 months
- Plan and pay for trips independently
- Average or above-average income
- Reside in large cities (million-plus population)
Results
Key Findings
- Participants actively use memory features in applications, evoking positive emotions.
- Most store memories in their phone gallery or cloud services.
- Participants are eager to engage with travel content from others, but leave comments less frequently.
Answers to research questions
- Users share their impressions on social media and in chats.
- They usually share photos and stories.
- Information is passed on to friends and acquaintances.
- Memories are stored in their gallery, Instagram archives, and cloud services.
- They want to see information about the duration of the trip, kilometers traveled, and places visited.
- The desire to showcase beautiful places and emotions motivates them.
Problems and how users address them
- Lack of convenient functionality: They use different platforms (Instagram, Facebook).
- Insufficient integration: They combine services for planning.
- Inconvenience with the memory feature on iPhone: They switch to Google Photos.
- Lack of automation: They create videos manually.
- Disabled push notifications: They check memories manually.
Quantitative Research
Method
Survey: Link to survey
General Population: 310 people
Feature share: 50%
Confidence Level: 95%
Margin of Error: +/- 5.56%
Hypotheses
- Users prefer visual travel summaries over text.
- Users are interested in viewing other travelers' trip summaries.
- Users will find it convenient to plan trips and store photos in one app.
- Users prefer to receive push notifications that remind them of previous trips.
Sample
- Men and women aged 20-44
- Travel at least twice a year
- Last trip taken within the last 3 months
- Plan and pay for trips independently
- Average or above-average income
- Reside in large cities (million-plus population)
Results
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1: users prefer visual travel summaries over text. 72% of respondents chose photos as their preferred format.
Hypothesis 2: 50% of users never edit their photos/videos. A simple editor will be useful for beginners, while integration with professional apps will benefit advanced users.
Hypothesis 3: users are interested in viewing other people's travel summaries. 63.8% of respondents show a high interest in viewing others' reports.
Hypothesis 5: users want to store photos and plan trips in one place. 65% prefer combining photo storage and trip planning in a single app.
Conclusion:
All hypotheses were confirmed: users prefer visual summaries, enjoy sharing and viewing others' reports, and want to integrate trip planning and photo storage in one service. Budget reports and photo editing are crucial features to consider during development.
Features to Implement:
- Synchronization with phone galleries and cloud services.
- Simple tools for editing photos and videos, as well as integration with professional apps.
- Option to share travel summaries and view others' reports.
Design Solution
Prototyping and Usability Testing
Goal: study user experience and identify pain points.
Actions: developed prototypes focusing on travel summary creation and editing. Emphasis was placed on navigation and ease of use for editing functions.
1st Iteration
Goal: identify issues and gather recommendations for improvement.
Actions: user testing of the prototype to spot weaknesses.
Results:
- Issues: unclear navigation, limited editing tools.
- Recommendations: improve visibility of key features and expand editing capabilities.
Conclusion
The project needs enhanced navigation and more flexible editing tools to improve user experience and app functionality.
2st Iteration
Goal: Improve the prototype based on the first round of testing.
Actions:
- Enhanced synchronization: Optimized the process for uploading and syncing photos and videos.
- Added illustrations to statistics: The statistics screen became more visually appealing.
- Refined editing and sharing features: Expanded manual editing options and simplified the process of publishing summaries on social media.
Results: Improved navigation, better visualization of statistics, more user-friendly editing and sharing process.
Final Solution
- Made the path to travel summaries more obvious.
- Added elements that suggest the option to create a clip based on the travel summary.
- The statistics screen can include a personalized experience of a specific trip.
- Designed the feature for automatic creation of travel summaries based on uploaded media.
- Simplified the process of publishing travel summaries on social media.
Conclusion
During our project, we conducted in-depth research into user needs and analyzed their preferences regarding the travel summary functionality. By using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we were able to identify key problem areas and determine important features for users.
Research Findings:
- Users prefer visual results (photos and videos) over text descriptions.
- A high interest in travel summaries from other users confirms the need for features to view and interact with content.
- Automatic creation of summaries and ease of publication on social media are important aspects.
These results significantly influenced the development and refinement of prototypes. We focused on improving navigation, visualizing statistics, and editing functionality, leading to a more user-friendly and attractive interface.
Expected Outcomes and Improvements for Users
We anticipate that:
- Users will engage more actively with the application due to the improved interface and new functionality.
- User engagement will increase thanks to the convenient creation and publication of travel summaries.
- The overall user experience will become more enjoyable and intuitive, positively impacting user satisfaction and their willingness to use the application in the future.
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