Time
2024.03-2024.06
Role
Founder Product Designer
Project Type
Startup project
Team Structure
Claire Li, CEO
Sam Xu, CTO
Front-end Engineers
Back-end Engineers
Project Stage
First MVP Launched
Tools
Figma, Protopie, Google Material Design System
01 The Travel Planning Struggle
Ever see a stunning travel photo on Instagram, like it, and then...never actually plan the trip? You're not alone. Later, when vacation fever hits, the struggle begins. Scouring Reddit for tips, searching TripAdvisor for reviews, and piecing it all together on Notion.
Ugh, the endless jumping between platforms!
You hear ChatGPT can help, so you excitedly ask it to "plan a 6-day Grand Circle roadtrip!" But wait... ChatGPT doesn't know your starting pointor preferred activities. Back to Notion you go. 20-25 hours later, your (exhausted) masterpiece is complete.
02 Business opportunity
Thriving travel market (domestic & near-recovered international) fueled by high-spending younger demographics (Millennials & Gen Z) creates a prime opportunity for AI travel planning apps.
After first round of meetings with CEO and CTO, our overall user flow and technical solutions is as below. We would utalize user input data and their live updates through our LLM and analysis methods to ensure a powerful AI platform that can create a creator community and deeply personalized functions as well as real time recommendations and AI itinerary integration.
Traditional Travel Planning Apps
Traditional apps can be limited and have low user engagement. Our AI is there for you every step of the way, not just planning. It even provides engaging content in-between trips, keeping users interested. This makes our app more versatile and user-friendly.
AI travel planning tools
any AI travel planners offer similar recommendations for everyone. We personalize your experience by learning from your preferences and habits. This allows us to create a unique travel plan just for you.
ChatGPT & Gemini Prompt tests
I explored various prompts to assess feasibility via both ChatGPT and Gemini, collaborating with our ML co-founder.
InfiniTrips
So what set us apart from traditional app and AI planner is our engaging and personalized experience.
01 Initial thoughts and user flow
At first, the company only think of a very basic thought of travel planning tool which has very low frequencey of usage, users import contents and generate a plan, done.
02 Mid-fi user flow
After our previous research, we decided to expand the scope of this app to not only travel planning but also exploring for inspirations and tracking travel progress as well as capturing the memories.
6 in depth user interviews helped us make decisions of a comprehensive user flow
These interviews refuted our initial thoughts such as we brainstormed that users may want to view friends' itineraries and discuss travel plans with them, and users may want to import contents from the inside portal as a button put on the homepage. It also guide us the layout of a page contains generated plans.
Import methods Hypothesis
At first we came up with these 4 ways to import contents after first discussion with engineers
1. Input link
2. input manually
3. import screnshots/original images
4. import video
Import Page Final Design
After another round of discussion with engineers about feasibility and given user feedbacks, we refined the portal to let users import links or text or upload images into the app.
