Wanderlust
Wanderlust is a collection of Arity data-enabled features within Roadtrippers that enhance the user’s travel experience by offering planning ease, itinerary enjoyment, and an intuitive review system.
Overview
Arity, founded by Allstate in 2016, is a mobility data collection and analytics company focused on making traveling smarter, safer, and more useful.
Arity is keen to transform the transportation ecosystem utilizing strategic partnerships to gather more robust behavioral insights. How might we create a differentiated travel experience utilizing Arity data?
Roles
Project management, research, interviews and user tests, concept ideation
Client
I. Discover
In an effort to challenge our brief, our team researched existing applications within the travel industry by conducting a current state assessment and a thorough comparative and competitive analysis.
Explore the scope
We conducted twelve user interviews and four stakeholder interviews in continuation of our research phase.
Interviews
II. Define
We synthesized our research findings and learned:
Insights
We identified strategic potential within Roadtrippers.
Partnership
Road-tripper Ronaldo, 23 years old
Self-described foodie with an infinite appetite for adventure and love for finding hidden gems
Time and budget savvy
Enjoys taking long road trips with friends but dreads the stressful planning process
Persona
Journey Map
III. Develop
In a cycle, we iterated through key concepts and features created from opportunity areas by user testing low fidelity prototypes.
Concept, ideate, evaluate 🔁
IV. Deliver
We implemented design features that directly met users needs on their journey. Let’s follow our persona, Roadtripper Ronaldo, through their journey.
Features
Stakeholder Feedback
Users are willing to share data if there is a clear end benefit within the app experience.
Users feel overwhelmed managing travel plans using many different resources.
Users plan trips around peer advice and interest, yet do not feel compelled to leave reviews.
Users select travel routes based on efficiencies, improvements, or new experiences.
Roadtrippers is a web-based software application, mobile app, and content provider that helps travelers plan road trips. The software lets users discover points of interest in the United States and Canada.
Information architecture
We empathized with our users and their needs.
We modeled our users’ journey.
“Planning out trips is like playing a puzzle... I use close to different 20-30 applications and websites.”
Pain Point
Roadtripper x Wander Mode
In Wander mode, Roadtrippers recommends the best road trip options based on user input. Among the options, Ronaldo can sort by interests such as route popularity. They can then use a toggle feature to customize their itinerary under trip details,
“We didn’t plan to do this but we ended up driving back roads with no music, no destination in mind.”
Live notification updates provide suggestions to discover nearby, time sensitive events while the user is in route. Ronaldo can add or dismiss this added experience.
In the evaluation phase, Ronaldo can set in app notification preferences - such as selecting lunch restaurant options within a certain distance around lunchtime.
“I try to find the highest rating... [but] I usually leave reviews once or twice a year in extreme circumstances.”
The Smart Review feature encourages users to leave reviews by creating a simple system with immediate rewards. Location check in automatically collects points, for merit and partner discounts. Now Ronaldo can find a peer review community within the app.
Pain Point
Roadtripper x Wander Mode
Pain Point
Roadtripper x Wander Mode
“I posted on instagram stories daily when I traveled... I looked forward to the photo dump on instagram after each trip.”
Although their trip is over, Ronaldo can access a memory bank of media artifacts and reviews collected along the way.
In one click, Ronaldo can share an auto-curated Itinerary Rewind with his friends via text or social media, inspiring everyone to plan the next trip!
Delightful Moment
Roadtripper x Wander Mode
Interaction
“Love the collaborative aspect of it, following routes with ratings that others have already used. Great way to make use of our data while merging it with other sources. Notifications as you presented them made a ton of sense, would have been cool to see some more detail here, maybe discounts tied to those.”
“The post-trip ideas were provoking for me, and I particularly liked the idea of using post-trip experiences to encourage repeat usage. I guess this is something our CEO is very interested in as well. I suggested the Roadtrippers team try some generative research in this space to see if it’s worth getting on their Roadmap.”
Play with our planning flow demonstration, embedded from Figma ➡️
PS. I recommend clicking the down carrot (v) on the top right and selecting ‘fit to screen.’
Since Wanderlust was a proposed integration into an existing application, we created a broad site map framework that surveyed the current (top) and proposed (bottom) application framework.
V. Debrief
Key Learnings
Strategic partnerships empower the richness of data by leveraging field expertise.
Users are sensitive to sharing data due to privacy concerns. Transparency and value add are critical to earn user trust.
A cohesive design process creates a powerful story.
Distributing roles based on individual strengths was very productive for our team. It allowed us to work efficiently and create high fidelity deliverables, while learning from one another.
The team, the team, the team
Thank you to Liying Peng and Yiwen Sun for not only being fantastic design partners and teachers, but also for making this project so fun and exciting to work on together.