Unpack

Executive Summary

Problem

How might we create a collaborative and communicative tool to help people plan in a group during the trip planning process?
A lot goes into planning a trip, especially with a group of friends - it’s difficult to try to keep everyone’s opinion into account and for everyone to feel heard. And while on the trip, making last minute group decisions and coordinating with everybody can catalyze conflicts during the trip.

Insights

1. While users say they like to be spontaneous about their itinerary, in reality, users try to keep in mind how they are spending their time and money.
2. When planning for a trip, users experience the most conflict when trying to compromise on what their itinerary should look like, especially when choosing restaurants.
3. Groups have a blend of planning styles - people who take the lead as planners and those who are participants and don’t create their own input.
4. Users like to leave room 
for spontaneity and flexible planning. This catalyzes conflict during the trip when some members feel like they are wasting time trying to make decisions.

Solution

Unpack is an app for making trip planning with friends easier. Through Unpack, everyone can see each other’s personal preferences (minimizing the need for members to reiterate their likings), real-time locations to make group coordination easier, suggested activities to catalyze the planning process while on the trip, and daily itineraries to help everyone have a general structure about what the day will look like as well as easily identify when the group will have room for last-minute activities. Unpack aims to help minimize the time invested into the planning process and reinvest that saved time into actual experiences. When you’re looking for somewhere to go, add places directly to the itinerary from the map.

Pre-Ideation

Team Contract

Before beginning the project, our team sat down and created a team contract to establish a set of ground rules for our working process and assign roles and expectations for each team member. I, along with Wendy Li, was given the role of research lead. This meant that our main tasks were to facilitate interviews and create interview protocols, organize research, and ensure the validity of our research. In regards to interviews, we looked into applicable research findings, unbiased questions to facilitate responses, and also schedule a sufficient amount of interviews so we had a wide range of opinions and responses. When it came to our research, we curated information that would be helpful for our needs and the scope of the project, identifying gaps in the research to fill in wherever necessary, and confirmed that our research sources were verified, diversified, and appropriate.

Problem

Evolution of our Project Definition

The original prompt for this project was: How can we help people make great, evidence-based decisions about where to go and what to do on a trip by helping them stitch together the hundreds of pages, reviews, images, articles, listicles, blog posts, forum posts, etc. they need to go through? From there, our team narrowed down on the specific issues that we wanted to tackle. We knew we wanted our target user base to be young adults, specifically in their early twenties, who live busy lives as college students. From there, we realized that as students living on a semester schedule, these young adults would most likely go on short-term, domestic travels during their shorter breaks. Furthermore, if when they were younger their tripmates were their family, as new adults with increased freedoms, now their tripmates were likely to be their friends. Thus the question became, how can we create a solution that can help friend groups plan for short-term, domestic travel and assist everyone to stay on the same page both during the planning stage of the trip and during the actual trip itself (in where there is a lot of room for conflict)?

Research

Methods

In order to gain a better understanding of our research space, we conducted several methods of research, including think-alouds, semi-structured interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys, storyboarding, speed dating, affinity diagramming, and usability testing.

Evidence

After conducting multiple interviews about our problem space, we created an affinity diagram to summarize our individual notes and see overlapping topics. From here we developed high-level insights. One quote from an interview we kept in mind throughout our project was, "I want my ideas seen in the itinerary and see it happen during the trip so my friends and I can have a good time." Another interviewee said, "It's hard to confirm if I should add something to an itinerary or not. If I ask something in the groupchat, everyone has to answer yes or no right then and there to confirm their thoughts, or else the event gets lost in all the messages. Even if everyone is online at that time, some people are distracted by other things and don't respond to me."

Insights

Once we got more context about the problem and found that people often devote a large chunk of time while on the trip to decide where to actually go and what to actually do. A key insight we found after talking to some people was that, while on a trip, people generally want to keep a degree of spontaneity and be open to adding unanticipated activities to the plan. However, it’s inevitable that not everyone in the group will be 100% committed to participating in these spontaneous plans, which affects the general agreeableness of the entire group. To add on, the spontaneous nature of traveling can also cause conflicts during the trip as a lot of time is wasted on updating the plans to last-minute changes –– this problem is especially prevalent in the topic of deciding where to eat as a group. The process of editing the itinerary on the trip is especially difficult: we found that groups often have a blend of planners and “go with the flow” members, which makes it difficult to gauge everyone’s genuine interest levels and to reach a group consensus.