CollaboRoute
Role: Founder
Date: February 2020 - December 2020
Purpose: Husky Startup Challenge and later, Interaction Design 2 w/ Geoff House
Goal: To make group travel simpler for students
I got to work on CollaboRoute on two separate occasions and it’s something that’s very near and dear to my heart. I’m passionate about all things travel, product design, and entrepreneurship and this project is the perfect love child of the three. This is also the first product I’ve been able to flesh out from idea inception to “final” designs on my own without collaborators or outside stakeholders — and I’ve got lots to say about it! Without further ado…
So, what is CollaboRoute?
Problem Statement + Mission
Students studying abroad have become an increasingly large part of the travel industry, but a large sector of the companies succeeding in this market are offering all inclusive bus tours packages or something similar that doesn't allow students to customize their trip to their interests. Students traveling with friends for the first time (planning together, paying separately) have a unique set of problems and frustrations separate from family or business travel. This includes losing crucial planning information in a group chat when other conversation takes place, not being able to book large stays on one card (whether no one wants to or no one monetarily can), and being on different pages about plans when they are booked separately and individually.
CollaboRoute is a collaborative planning and booking app that aims to solve the frustrations of group travel. In the app, travelers can create a trip, organize every aspect of their plannings in one place, and alleviate large group payment concerns by splitting bookings right in the app.
How did this all start?
In Spring of 2020, just as lockdown started, I participated in the Husky Startup Challenge at the NU Entrepreneurs Club and made it as a finalist with my startup CollaboRoute! The Husky Startup Challenge consists of a semester of bootcamps including problem identification, talking to customers, startup strategy and positioning, business modeling, prototyping, and pitching. At the end of the semester, finalists get to pitch their idea at Demo Day in front of a panel of judges and an audience of 500+.
This idea stemmed from my personal experience studying abroad in Australia. For fall break, my friends and I wanted to book a trip with 10 other people and I quickly realized coordinating a trip with other “solo” travelers is really frustrating when everyone has different wants, and needs, and financial limitations. I wanted to create a product to solve all these little nuances of traveling as a student.
Take a scroll through my final pitch deck below.
For Interaction Design 2
In Fall of 2020, I was still working on fleshing out this idea past the quick wireframes I made for Demo Day. In school, I was taking Interaction Design 2 during my fall semester and our second project was to work on a complete set of views and flows to solve a problem in the community. Two birds, one stone — I got to continue working on the wireframes for my product with guidance and weekly feedback.
I targeted my focus on the “planning” problem — creating flows for creating a trip, joining it, discussing options, and being able to see the most up-to-date plan in one place. The “booking” issue requires more fleshing out on the business and logistics side that I would need to learn much more about before being able to properly design for.
Deliverables for this project included user interview findings, a customer journey map, a problem statement and user goal, an interactive prototype, user testing, iterations, and a final set of designs.
User Research
My Research Process
What I value most in research is being able to actually connect with who I’m designing for! As a Business and Design major, I’ve learned a lot about user research from both a market research perspective and a design thinking perspective.
In business (and entrepreneurship in particular), market research is all about validating your idea and making sure the problem you’re solving for actually exists. There’s a big focus on talking to your customers every step of the way and doubling back on every assumption you make. Skipping this step can be incredibly costly; creating a product nobody actually wants or needs seems to be the classic startup failure story.
In the design thinking process, the first step is to empathize! In my positions as a UX Designer at Bose and as a Design Strategist at Scout Labs, I’ve had this idea hammered in time and time again. Understanding your users is the first step to creating a fantastic product.
I definitely took aspects of both of these schools of thought into my user interviews for CollaboRoute. I believe the key is to find a balance between empathizing with users and validating assumptions, and above all, listening!
Research Assumptions
A large population of American university students study abroad at some point in their college journey.
Traveling with a variety of non-family members introduces confusion with logistics and payment.
Student travelers have different needs and preferences than traditional travelers (family vacations, business trips, etc.) that OTAs like Booking.com are catering for.
User Research Interviews
I interviewed 5 more people during the research phase for Interaction Design 2, in addition to the 5 people I interviewed for the Husky Startup Challenge. I made sure to interview people with varying experiences while studying abroad — different ages while abroad, different schools, different destinations. I even got to interview a friend who was currently abroad during COVID-19, which I was personally very curious about.
Key User Insights
Needs and considerations differ for solo travelers and group travelers.
Two sub-groups: students hopping around meeting up with friends from home country + students planning travel with friends made at the study abroad program
Strength of relationship with travelers affects trust with large group payments. Groups of acquaintances don’t feel as comfortable sharing one large down-payment and trusting that they’ll be paid back.
Interpersonal pain points while planning and booking travel with friends were more pressing than any logistics.
A lot of the frustrations with traveling had less to do with technology and travel itself (surprisingly, even during COVID), and more with preferences and limitations of the people.
When planning where to stay, college students value price and safety.
Hostels vs Airbnbs: Hostels and Airbnbs are the most common stays; students rarely stay in hotels.
Traveling around Europe is different from travel around Australia.
There are a lot more weekend trips to nearby countries that can be accessed by rail and are relatively easier to book. Prices for transportation also greatly vary.
Identifying Users, Problems, + Goals
The core users of this app are college students studying abroad who want to plan travel with a group.
Users want to be able to stay on the same page about the most up-to-date plan and discuss or vote on each travel option without it getting lost when more are sent.
Experience Mapping
I took everything from my own experience, the insights I collected from my user interviews in class, as well as my user interviews for my original pitch, and created this experience map. I thought I already knew more or less what I wanted to include in my flows, but actually going through the process of laying out the actions, thoughts, and needs/goals of my user helped me identify the exact opportunities I needed to hit to make this a successful user experience.
Wireframing
Lo-Fi Wireframes
The two core flows I wanted to cover in my prototype:
Staying on the same page about the most up-to-date plan
Discussing and voting on each travel option with the group
Having these two flows would satisfy what I decided to be necessities for an MVP.
I started to break down the first flow and explore how it all might fit together. I didn’t really have a good idea of how the stay/flight pages would look like since I didn’t know what development functionalities that would require or how it would work logistically. Would it be possible to have the web page embedded in the app? Or would it have to be some sort of external linking? I really wanted to avoid the user leaving the app since that defeated the purpose of having “all your travel planning and booking in one place”. Alas, I put in a placeholder there for the lo-fi’s (last screen).
Hi-Fi Wireframes —> Prototype
I recognize how dysfunctional this screenshot looks (I’m working on it!), but I’m all for transparency in the design process. For hi-fi’s, I expanded on the flow I started above and added in the second part for voting and discussion. I still hadn’t figured out how to solve my linkage problem, but pasted a direct link to a hostel in that screen for pure testing purposes. You get the idea.
User Testing
Here’s a link to the Figma prototype.
For testing, I used these three tasks to guide my participants through the demo:
Task 1: You’re studying abroad in Australia and want to plan a trip with your friends for Fall Break. One of friends gives you a code to plan the trip on a collaborative travel planning app and asks you to join it. How would you go about doing this?
Task 2: Now you want to find out what’s been decided on already. Where do your friends want to stay?
Task 3: You don’t love the hostels that they’ve already chosen and you found one that you want to show the group. How would you do this?
Key User Testing Insights
Two flows to find hostel — both were utilized and seemingly intuitive
Suggestion to order transportation above stays
Gut check: linear itinerary is more intuitive, but there is value in having all the transportation logistics together on one page
Users thoughts planned stays were based on likes — didn’t notice bolding or stars
Hostel ABC Page: nobody interacted with this page once landing on it
Prototype error: need a way to escape an incomplete “Suggest a Stay” flow
Product Improvements
I took these findings and incorporated them into my final designs. The prototype from above doesn’t include them since it’s what I used to test my first prototype with. The two key flow improvements I made are visually detailed below.
What’s next?
If you scrolled to the end of my original pitch deck, you’ll likely have noticed that the plan was to go-to-market in 2021-2022. I’ve considered working with a technical founder and developing an MVP to continue the momentum, but have decided to put a hold on this project for the time being.
My passions for both travel and entrepreneurship have flourished since and I don’t doubt that something similar will come up again in the future. I got a great opportunity to hone my skills in user research, experience design, and mobile interaction design and I appreciate every bit of this process.
For now, I am continuing to focus on building my skills in all the areas necessary to make a great product. Working on something like this for the pure process of learning has been incredibly valuable, but I would love to apply it to something I would get to see actual users using in the future.