Trip Together
Millions of people travel with their friends and family members throughout the year. However, when it comes to planning a trip with a large number of people, it gets convoluted since each person has a different idea of where they want to go, how much they want to spend, where they want to stay, how much they are committed to going, etc.
To solve the complex trip problem, Trip Together is a React Native application that makes trip planning, task delegation, and team collaboration easier than ever across Android and iPhones. The Trip Together team consists of six members: Braeden Haesemeyer, Romo Islam, Uan Le, Shirui Ren, Governess Simpson, and me.
To understand more about the problem, each member of the team conducted user research interviews with other students from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities to explore and learn more about their past experience with negotiating travel plans with family members, friends, or even strangers. We created a consent form that listed introductory information and background, our procedure with time estimates, any potential risks and benefits, and any comments about confidentiality and contact information. After the interviews, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the combined interviews to identify themes and patterns.
What We Found
- Generally, one person likes to make all of the travel arrangements for the group.
- Price is the most important consideration in trip-planning.
- It’s difficult to determine how committed users are to organizing and attending the trip.
Based on what we found, for the app’s design implications, we can
- Allow one person to plan the trip (potentially as an admin) and others as collaborators who can comment and make edits as needed.
- Make it easier for price comparison of different trips, and ensure that the set budget is adhered to.
- Consider that people have different levels of commitment when organizing, planning, and actually attending the trip.
App Development Features
As we begin to create the UI and implement the Trip Together app, which allows users to organize and manage travel plans together, we wanted to have the following key features:
- Simple user interface
- Pages for survey arrangement
- Location
- Where to stay
- Budget
- Assign roles to each user
- Admin
- Planner
- Flight/transportation booker
- Collaborator
- Display the timeline and schedule
- Create and assign tasks
- Progress tracker
Demo
Contribution
- Conduct interviews and qualitative analysis to find themes and patterns in trip planning
- Communicate with all group members to plan the tasks that need to be completed
- Setup a database connection with XMLHttpRequest
- Implement the Landing page to view or add trips; the Trip Info page to show the trip’s members, tasks, schedules, and progress
- Implement the Survey section for the Trip Location, Hotel Type, and Budget arrangements
- Users have the ability to press the fields to fill out the form
- Style React Native components into simpler UI designs
Lessons Learned
- Design and implementation an application requires many steps in order to produce a great application
- Improve application for user satisfaction through multiple collective feedbacks
- Utilize React Native components to display across different sections of the application
- Improve my designing skills for any application by learning from teammates’ work
- Strive for a simple UI and user-friendly designs