BUILDING A TRAVEL PLANNING EXPERIENCE
PROJECT MANAGEMENT | UI/UX
A product that enables travelers to plan and collaborate with friends and family with ease by unifying the experience.
OVERVIEW
THE
CLIENT
Goibibo is India’s leading online travel booking brand providing a range of choices for hotels, flights, trains, buses, and cars for travelers was founded in 2007. Monthly Active Users more than 10.5 Million. The company is a subsidiary of Make My Trip Limited (since 2017)
OBJECTIVE
Build a product that is cohesive, user-friendly and helps the users to plan a trip with friends or family. Leveraging the Goibibo data from different verticals. The aim was to provide an integrating experience.
Android and iOS
MY ROLE
I led the UX/UI efforts and also took charge as a product management and worked with a team of 15 people that included the product directors, tech leads and 8 developers. Maintaining the health of the product was also a part of my responsibitlity
Design, Product Management
IMPACT
The product led to increase in Customer engagement, personalized approach for customers. Improved conversion rate of via call, logical structure, Curated recommendations and better collaboration functionality.
9K Shortlists, 250 Plans/Day.Won "Performer of the year"award
CONTEXT
When a group of Friends or family decide to come to Goibibo to plan a trip, Goibibo has all the raw material to that is needed ti cook up a brilliant travel plan, but imagine if you got to a restaurant with your friends or family to enjoy a wholesome meal, but for each course you need to go to different floors and pay the bill before having the next course. That’s the kind of feeling a user gets when they try to book a holiday .
A travel planning feature that gives a one stop shop experience to the users
PLAN
Concept to Product in 6 Months
Project timeline
CHALLENGE
Kick off with the Stakeholders
At the kick-off, key business goals and the vision for the product were defined.
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Onboarding different teams and aligning the vision.
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Key identified questions and challenges
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Business
GOALS AND CHALLENGES
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Create a travel planning feature that leverages the data available within the company.
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Build a shortlist feature for all the verticals.
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Build a feature that integrates seamlessly with the existing offerings. Maintain users' entry and exist into respective funnels without increasing drop-off rate.
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Increase the user engagement
DESIGN
Crafting the Experience
The complexity and timeframe of this project demanded a tailored Design approach
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Existing knowledge and analytics data from different verticals helped us to understanding the user behavior.
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Research efforts were put in to build a better understanding of the user when it comes to travel planning
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Interview sessions and Insights from the data helped us create two persona types.
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Collaboration and communication was a key in this project, All the verticals worked together to create a distinct user experience
THE SOLUTION
By leveraging the database create a one stop shop experience for its users.
Understanding The Key Personas
Persona 1:The Planner
Faris
The Planner
Traveling is a hobby but planning is a skill. I am a skilfull traveller.
Age:
Location:
Occupation:
29
Bangalore
Photographer
Bio
Faris is From Kerala, India. He loves to travel so that he can get inspired to take photographs.
He enjoys organizing events and workshops. He explores hidden travel destinations across India and captures great pictures.
Organized
Adventurous
Punctual
Hardworking
Goals
Have a solo exhibition of his work
Travel and meet new people
Explore more travel destinations
Organize travel groups and conduct photography workshops on site
Wants & needs
Want a seamless Planning experience
Collaboration should not be so hard
One platform that could give him all information
Managing bookings when traveling in a group.
Pain Points
Getting the group of friends to agree on one thing
Sharing multiple screen shots when it comes to collaborating.
Making multiple bookings
Constantly have to call the group members to make decisions.
Journey Map
The two main personas that the designs w
Persona 2: The Co-Traveller
Aastha Goel
Bio
Astha is from New Delhi, India. Astha loves to travel and goes on vacations every time she gets a chance. She loves to travel with her friends and family. Astha keeps a travel bucket list.
Adventurous
Enthusiastic
Caring
Unorganized
Goals
Travel to more exciting places
Learn about new cultures
Create a travel vlog and click amazing pictures
Wants & needs
Make planning easier
Avoid multiple app usage
Recommendations with best ratings and reviews
Better and easier collaboration with friends
A personal travel planner or an assistant to plan the travel.
Pain Points
Planning for a trip is something she does not enjoy
Getting friends to agree on a trip is another big hassel
Researching various sites tol ook for travel options creates confusion and stress
Sharing screenshots of the flights.
The Co traveller
Traveling is my passion but planning is not.
Age:
Location:
Occupation:
31
Bangalore
Staff Engineer
Journey Map
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User
GOALS AND CHALLENGES
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How might we help users to explore more destinations?
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Get the best travel recommendations
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Collaborating and communicating between friends while planning a trip needs to be easier.
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Ability to save and hare their travel ideas
Defining User Tasks and Flows
Creating user flows helped the entire team to come on the same page and gave clarity about the scope of work, and sprint planning became easier. Following are a few key user flows:
1.User shortlists and adds a flight to the plan page
3.User Adds friends to a Plan.
2.User creates a new plan
Wireframes
SOLUTION
The final product was implemented in iOS and Android devices. Keeping in mind the business goal of simple integration with different verticals while providing the users an engaging planning experience.
Key features for the product:
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Integrated travel experience
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Curated Recommendations
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Ability to shortlist and share with co travelers
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Chat and collaborate with ease
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Vote and make quick decisions
DEVELOP
Agile Sprint Planning
Coordinating And Managing The Development Team
A project milestone was reached where design work was translated into requirement documents that could be used by the tech team in parallel.
Agile Methodology and scrum
Agile methodology was followed and sprints were planned and tasks were assigned, Focused efforts helped in achieving timely delivery and little backlog.
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Final Product
The plan page
Collaborate and add plan members
Efficient communication
Explore travel destination ideas
Test and Launch
After rigorous manual and automated testing of all the features the roll out strategy was to ship the product to a selected set of users on iOS devices, followed by Android.
Tracking the numbers
3K
Hotels Shortlist/day
4K
Flights Shortlist/day
250
plans /day
3.5
Friends Invited/plan
LEARNING
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In this project I got the opportunity to work as a product manager, build and ship a complex product.
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I acquired a number of new skills including project management skills and learnt how to work with numbers and understand the intricacies of development.
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As a next step, we monitored the data and iterated the product based on feedback.