Itinerary
Traveling professionals often have difficulties organizing a time to meet up with clients, colleagues, and even their friends and families due to time constraints and scattered availability. Itinerary is a platform made for digital nomads, world travelers, business travelers, and/or for the use of personal leisure. This platform blends the intuitive UX aspects found in products like Google Calendar and When2Meet. It’s great to use for quick and casual meetings, but it’s also useful for creating more formal or professional gatherings.
The Problem
Digital nomads are always late to meetings, miss important events, and/or are overall not on top of their schedules. They’re often traveling, working in the field, and are always on the go.
The Goal
To create a digital calendar intuitive enough to suggest meeting times, account for the user’s time zones, and is proactively working for the user to make sure they are on top of their schedules.
Project: Itinerary
Category: UX/UI Case Study
Duration: Jun - Aug 2021
Role: Concept, Research, Visual Design
People need a way to make planning meetings, get-togethers, and events easier. The problem lies within the sporadic free time spread out between each person’s week. Itinerary intends to address this issue by finding common ground within an individual or group’s free time during the day, week or month.
Understanding the User
In Itinerary’s design process, I opted for a goal-directed design approach which helped me move along through the timeline smoothly. Qualitative research proved to be the most effective during the design process, most notably with the user interviews and usability testing sessions. Whenever I encounter an issue that I’m trying to solve, it’s smart to build a good foundation. In Itinerary’s case, I did this by asking some generic but useful internal questions.
“Is there domain specific knowledge to know?”
“What do the users need the most in a product like this?”
“Who are the biggest competitors right now?”
“Who are the primary and secondary audiences?”
“What are the challenges I will face moving forward?”
“Which users are the most important for this concept?'“
Preliminary Ideation
I used affinity mapping to identify not only the general scope of Itinerary, but to decide which direction I wanted to take the product. This was a form of brainstorming during the kickoff period that proved to be very helpful in setting up the foundation for the rest of my process as well as the concept.
Research Insights
I conducted a user questionnaire to gauge the meeting or event-planning impact on people in terms of convenience, as well as what role they played during the planning process itself. These are the highlights of the insights discovered when working through the questionnaire results and feedback.
45% of participants stated they are usually the primary organizer of meetings or get-togethers.
More than 65% of participants stated they primarily use their laptops or desktops when organizing meetings and itineraries over smartphones.
Participants meet with their colleagues, friends and family on average 15 - 20 times per month.
Most participants claim to have pain points when waiting for a response from their peers.
85% of participants want their digital calendars to be intuitive, collaborative, and accommodating whenever they’re on the go.
Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook were among the most popular outlets for meetings.
Meet the User
Elio Jackson
Age: 28 years old
Education: College Degree
Family: Single
Hometown: New York City
Occupation: Designer & Teacher
Interest: Travel, Music, Painting
Elio is an international traveler and a digital nomad, he works remotely in different countries as a freelance graphic designer and English teacher. He has a busy lifestyle and is always living life to the fullest. Elio has to schedule many meetings with clients, colleagues, and even friends during his travels, but sometimes flakes due to his busy lifestyle and lack of availability.
User Journey Map
After identifying the persona, I created two sets of user journey maps. The user journey map of Elio’s experiences using the platform is to help identify possible pain points and improvement opportunities.
Most of the time, products tend to usually just have one primary user journey scenario. However, I identified two user journey scenarios when using Itinerary. The user will experience a scenario as the planner of an event or a meeting, and another experience when participating in an event that the user didn't create themselves.
The scope of the product allowed me to focus more on these two pathways as there aren't any notable validation scenarios other than entering a familiar settings screen.
Creating a Framework
To better understand how I would construct the core experience for Itinerary, I designed a user flow. This helped me focus more on the experience and needs of the user and less so on the details that would solidify later on. It also allowed me to communicate the entries and exits more clearly so I would have a better understanding moving forward in the process.
Starting the Design
Before I began to sketch the wireframes, I created a site flow to easily understand a holistic view of the platform. This helped me identify the main functions and how the user would navigate throughout.
The platform consists of two main functions, Calendar and Moments. Calendar is the main service within the platform while Moments is a section where users can view their memorable moments from an event, appointment, or anything they’ve added as an entry within their calendar.
I’ve added the Moments section as research shows the need for social interaction within a calendar platform. Moments will include group itineraries, notes, documentation, photos, and videos. Many participants from the research phase suggested this idea alongside integration and collaboration.
I started putting ideas on paper by sketching wireframes for each screen keeping the user's pain points and needs in mind. Working through a couple of really preliminary sketches, I realized some of the ideas and layouts that I had in mind just wouldn't work. Not only was I able to quickly weed out some of the ideas that didn’t work, but I was also able to take those mistakes to create more useful layouts.
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Moving from paper to digital wireframes made it easy to understand how the redesign could help address user pain points and improve the user experience. Prioritizing useful button locations and visual element placement on the home page was a key part of my strategy.
Low-fidelity Prototype
I then tested out the low-fidelity prototype to make sure the user flow functions properly before proceeding to a high-fidelity design. I connected all of the screens involved in the primary user flow of using the Calendar and the Moments tabs.
Refining the Design
High-fidelity Wireframes
Based on the insights from the usability study, I made changes to improve the page’s flow. I proceeded with updating the user flow by creating high-fidelity mockups to reflect the final product.
High-fidelity Prototype
The high-fidelity prototype followed the same user flow as the low-fidelity prototype and included the design changes made after the usability study, as well as several changes suggested by the participants.
Planner's Flow
Participant’s Flow
Final Design
Takeaways
Impact
The participants shared that the design was intuitive to navigate through, more engaging with the images, and demonstrated a clear visual hierarchy.
What I Learned
I learned that even a small design change can have a huge impact on the user experience. The most important takeaway for me is to always focus on the real needs of the user when coming up with design ideas and solutions.