Planventure

Team

Aleksey
Yanovich

Manasa
Lingireddy

Mengqi
Shi

Ryan
Le

Thien-An
Nguyen

Problem and Design Overview

Travelers often face challenges in turning saved travel inspiration from platforms like Instagram or TikTok into actual plans. Coordinating schedules, budgeting, and making group decisions for meals, accommodations, and activities can be overwhelming, especially considering different preferences and constraints. These pain points often lead to conflict, inefficiency, and stress which can make traveling less fun and more chaotic for everyone.

Our design transforms the travel planning process into an engaging, adventure game-like experience. It allows users to incorporate saved destinations, collaboratively plan detailed itineraries, and make decisions effortlessly. Key features include interactive budget and preference tools, group voting mechanisms, and timely notifications of itinerary updates. By gamifying the experience and enabling equal participation, the design ensures that planning is organized, stress-free, and enjoyable. This in return makes sure users are satisfied and excited for their travel plans!

Home page where users can see all their trips.

Design Walkthrough

Like we mentioned before, planning group travel is very chaotic, with travelers struggling to turn saved inspiration from platforms like Instagram or TikTok into actionable plans. To address this, our design introduces gamification to the travel planning process, making it fun and collaborative. Through features like group voting, budgeting tools, and real-time notifications, users can efficiently plan itineraries while balancing group preferences. We decided on this approach after conducting interviews with travelers aged 18–25 who rely on social media for travel ideas but face challenges organizing group trips. Their feedback inspired us to focus on two critical tasks central to an enjoyable, stress-free travel planning experience.

Reducing the Pressure of Making Decisions for Activities

Our design simplifies group decision-making by using anonymous voting and mini-games. Users can suggest activities, such as restaurants or activities, and cast votes using tokens. The tokens help increase the weight of a user's vote, allowing people who feel strongly about an option to make a bigger impact on the decision. The goal is to make sure every voice is heard. When disagreements arise, users can play a mini-game to challenge the final decision. The mini-game is generated based on the content filled out by the user on a starting page. The page prompts users to input their desired activity time, location, approximate budget, and other optional details. Each category of information is represented by bubbles of different colors (e.g., time is displayed in green bubbles, while location is shown in orange). Each suggestion occupies a single bubble (e.g., "8 PM" is in one bubble, while "7 PM" is in another). Users can click on the bubbles they prefer, making them grow larger—essentially "voting" for their favorite plan. Ultimately, the system selects the largest bubble from each category and combines them into a new travel plan for further discussion. The mini-game helps create a collaborative and playful way to resolve conflicts related to planning. By combining voting and gamification, the app reduces the stress of group planning and potential conflicts, making the experience more engaging, fair, and inclusive.

Overview of voting process involving mini-game.

Making Updates to Itinerary and Informing the Group

Another feature is that our app allows users to make real-time updates to their personal itineraries and notify the group of any changes. When a user decides to modify their plans—such as skipping an activity or choosing an alternative, an automatic notification is sent to the group, keeping everyone up to date. This feature makes sure that all members are informed about others' preferences and any alterations in the schedule. Additionally, if one user’s change interests someone else in the group, the app allows them to update their own itineraries and join the new plan. This helps with flexibility because users can personalize their experience while maintaining group cohesion. They are able to see their group's plan as well as their own. This is helpful as they will know which activties they are doing with their group and which ones they are doing on their own/smaller groups. The ability to make and share itinerary updates in real-time makes travel planning more organized, less stressful, and more adaptable to everyone’s needs.

Overview of making changes to personal itinerary and the change reflecting for everyone.

Design Research and Key Insights

Our design research aimed to identify key features users would appreciate in a travel planning app and understand their biggest pain points. To gain insights, we did interviews with individuals who actively use social media for travel inspiration because they are the ones directly affected by the challenges of planning group trips. We chose interviews because they allowed us to ask follow-up questions, delve deeper into users' preferences, and observe their reactions to potential features. This hands-on approach helped us determine which aspects of the app were most intuitive and how we could better address user needs.

Collaborative Decision-Making Reduces Planning Stress & Conflict

Our design research helped us learn that collaborative decision-making tools significantly reduce the stress of group travel. Participants shared that the process of choosing activities or hotels usually feels overwhelming, especially when there are conflicting preferences. One participant explained mentioned they would find themselves compromising on things they care about "just to make everyone happy," and avoid arguments This feedback emphasized the need for features that allow each traveler to have their say while reducing social pressure. This conclusion allowed us to design a voting system with optional game-like features to allow users to challenge group decisions in a low-pressure way. This insight shaped our design by emphasizing a system where everyone can easily voice their opinion, making travel planning feel less stressful and more inclusive.

Real-Time Updates For Itinerary Adjustments

Another key insight we found was related to the importance of real-time updates when adjusting itineraries. We found that the ability to easily change plans and notify others in real-time is really important especially when one person's preference diverged from the group. During our research, one of our participants mentioned how if someone wants to do something different from the rest of the group "it’s always awkward to bring it up." We figured if the app lets everyone know, it is less stressfull. This feedback led us to incorporate real-time itinerary updates, where users could update their plans, and others would be automatically notified. The ability for users to adjust their own plans while staying informed about others' decisions ensures that our app can allow for spontaneous changes without causing friction in the group.

Real time notification anytime a group member's itinerary changes.

Gamified Decision-Making Encourages Engagement

Another key insight was that the gamified aspect could work very well. We were able to validate that a gamified process would be the most effective way to engage users in decision-making and make the planning process more enjoyable. Participants expressed a preference for interactive elements that could make tedious tasks (group decision-making) feel less like a chore. Participants said it would be fun to compete with each other, especially for boring tasks like itinerary planning. This insight led us to integrate a mini-game feature where users could challenge group decisions with pooled tokens, making the process more playful. By turning decision-making into a game, we wanted to make sure users remained motivated and invested in the process. This also removed the stress of having to compromise on important travel decisions. This approach became an important aspect of our design because it shaped how we integrated interactive elements into the app to keep users engaged throughout the whole process.

Iterative Design and Key Insights

Our iterative design process started with a paper prototype to figure out the main functionality, layout, and user flow. Having this low-fidelity design allowed us to quickly visualize our ideas and core features. We then had heuristic evaluations during class, where the evaluators identified usability issues based on usability principles. Some of them included user flexibility and aesthetics. After this, we performed usability testing with potential users. By observing how they interacted with the prototype, we were able to note places where they felt confused with our design. Based on the feedback, we iteratively refined the paper prototype to make sure we still focused on the pain points while improving clarity of the user flow. Once the paper prototype was finalized, we created a higher-fidelity digital mockup on Figma to simulate the final product more realistically. Overall, this iterative process helped us identify and resolve gaps in the design that we had overlooked at first due to our own familiarity with the design. The insights we came across are described later on in this section. But by addressing these insights, we were able to make the design more user-centric.

Overview of our initial paper prototype.

More Clarity on Tokens

During heuristic testing, one of the users said they felt confused about how to use tokens for voting, how to get them, and how to navigate related features. This feedback highlighted a gap in user understanding of the voting process and the role tokens play in it. This is an issue as it can hurt engagement with our design. To address this, we introduced a "Help" button located in our design which provides clear, concise answers to frequently asked questions. The updated design, tested in the digital mockup phase, can help users navigate the process without any other additional assistance. This insight emphasized the importance of accessible support features in reducing cognitive load and improving user confidence.

Help feature that answers users questions about tokens and the mini games.

Chat Feature for Further Discussions

During usability testing, we discovered that it would be beneficial to discuss the results of the voting game, especially when the outcomes involved expensive or impractical decisions. A question that arose when testing was, "What if the winning option is something most people cannnot afford?." Initially, our paper prototype ended the experience once voting concluded, showing either a "You Lose" or "You Win" screen without further interaction. Based on this feedback, we decided to add a discussion feature in our design which would let participants chat about the results after the game. The updated design has a "I want to have a discussion" button on the final screen which links to a group chat where users can express concerns, suggest alternatives, or plan next steps. This insight was really important because it helped us come up with a feature that improves the inclusivity of the design by addressing real-world considerations beyond the voting process.

Chat feature to allow further discussion after decision has been made.

Competitive v.s. Collaborative Game Mechanics

Another key insight we derived was when our evaluators pointed out the original competitive game mechanics. Our original design declared a “winner” and a “loser,” which is problematic as it could potentialy negatively impact group dynamics and individual motivation. We realized this could make the voting process feel more competitive than collaborative, which in the long run could discourage participation. Overall, this feedback emphasized how competitive elements, like assigning loss labels, can foster resentment or disengagement which is the exact opposite of what our goal is for our design. To address this, we replaced the competitive structure with a collaborative framework. Our new version allows all participants to contribute their ideas and preferences without labeling anyone as a “loser.” By focusing on teamwork, this new design tries to remove the risk of interpersonal tension and instead maintains a positive group dynamic. Overall, this change aligned the experience of using our app with our goal of fostering more collaborative group dynamics.

Old design labels users as 'Losers' and 'Winners'.

Final prototype does not label anyone as 'Losers' in order to foster a competitive but still friendly atmosphere.