Competitive Analysis
As part of the design process for Roam, I conducted a competitive analysis of both direct and indirect travel planning platforms to understand strengths, weaknesses, and feature gaps. I compared tools like TripIt, Airbnb, Wanderlog, and TripAdvisor, focusing on features such as itinerary building, collaboration, booking capabilities, and trip document syncing.
This analysis revealed a lack of centralized tools that support real-time group collaboration and a streamlined planning experience across all travel needs. These insights helped shape Roam’s feature set to better address group coordination and reduce planning friction.
User Interviews
Interviews were conducted with 5 individuals who are part of the millennial age group. These individuals were known to travel somewhat frequently so they were good candidates for the interview process.
Some questions included:
How do you go about planning a group trip? What tools, websites, apps do you use?
How do you communicate planning details and decision-making with your group?
What are your goals when planning a group trip?
What emotions do you feel when planning a group trip?
What are your pain points when planning? What do you enjoy?
What would make the planning process more seamless
Key Takeaways
There is a desire to have a central hub that combines planning functionalities
The overwhelming decision-making process often leads people to just go with what the planner suggests or they don't participate in the process.
Travelers would like to plan more, like building an itinerary, but don't because it takes too much time and/or is too stressful.
Communication methods can be a roadblock throughout a lot of the planning process.
Full research synthesis can be viewed in FigJam: Affinity Map
POVs & HMWs
User Personas
Using my research findings and steps taken to define the problem, I moved on to ideate a potential solution. I came up with an idea, called Roam.
Below are my ideation notes:
Name: Roam
Who is it for? Millenial travelers
What does it accomplish for them? It helps make the planning process more seamless by:
(1) Helping tackle the painful task of making decisions among the group on things like accommodation, activities, restaurants, etc. in a way that is fun, easy, and increases participation in planning
(2) Making the process of taking all their decisions and seamlessly organizing them into a customizable itinerary with minimal effort so they can feel more relaxed before and during their trip
How does it accomplish this?
(1) Decision-making: Dating app format where each group member is shown a series of "profiles" of things like restaurants, activities, etc. After they go through all of these they can see the groups results based on everyones "votes"
(2) Itinerary Building: With a general consensus of what they'll be doing on the trip from their decision-making, Roam can automatically build this into an itinerary that allows the group to customize by moving things around based on their liking, adjust scheduling for more or less free time, and finalize in a format to their liking
Feature Diagram
With the general concept of Roam outlined, the next step was to define specific features and prioritize them based on what matters most to users while also aligning with long-term business goals. I organized the features into four tiers—Must Have, Nice to Have, Could Have, and Can Come Later—using insights from user interviews and competitive analysis.
Core features such as itinerary building, recommendations, group voting on trip ideas, and real-time chat were categorized as Must Haves, as they directly address user pain points around collaboration, decision-making, and planning efficiency. Features like calendar sync, map/calendar toggling, and smart itinerary tools aim to streamline the planning experience and reduce manual effort. Lower-priority features such as packing lists, budgeting tools, and email sync were marked for future development, ensuring the MVP remains focused and functional while laying the groundwork for future scalability.
Card Sort
After ideating what Roam will offer, I wanted to check in with users on how they think about the organization and categorization of the information within this product using a Card Sorting exercise.
My findings from the card sort were as follows:
Participants seemed to have varying ideas of how the information should be categorized outside of familiar categories (i.e. Account/Profile) and seemingly obvious categories (i.e. Explore)
Because this product idea is new and different from what participants are used to, they seem to have confusion on where to place cards centered around the planning process, current trips & itinerary or they were put under a category like Misc
Explore is definitely a category I will include due to its popularity and will think about potential search or filtering options for users to find this info
There may not be a need for Home category in this product or it may be called something else but users did not seem to consider this in their sorting
This exercise yielded useful information from users around the organization of the more familiar content categories. Conversely, I felt the actual planning functionality was too unfamiliar for the users at this time so the results varied a lot across those cards. This leaves an opportunity down the road to do this again once there’s a bit more structure to this product maybe with a demo/mock-up of what it does, as currently it’s so new to users that I don’t believe they fully understood the design when looking at these cards blindly.
Sitemap
With a general outline of what features and pages I’ll have in the product, I put together a sitemap to begin thinking about the loose organization of everything I’ve ideated so far.
User Flows & Task Flows
With a general idea of how the pages and content in Roam will be organized, I took to mapping out how users will move through them with various scenarios in User Flows and Task Flows to further solidify the organization of this product.
View User Flow here
View Task Flow here
Wireframing
I sketched a few ideas for Roam and then digitized those into wireframes as seen below or in my Figma file here.
The main feature The Group Sync where users can all vote on their activities in their group in a manner similar to a dating app (swipe left, swipe right). Additionally, Roam can take your activities and organize them into an easy to use itinerary!
HiFi
After validating the core features and structure in the low-fidelity wireframes, I transitioned into high-fidelity design with a focus on visual clarity, brand identity, and user experience. The Hi-Fi wireframes brought Roam’s playful and social travel-planning concept to life with a clean, modern UI and a friendly, intuitive layout. I refined the hierarchy, added visual indicators like progress bars (seen in Group Sync), and introduced consistent iconography and spacing to make interactions more approachable.
Key touchpoints like trip dashboards, Group Sync activity voting, and suggested destinations were visually prioritized to support users in discovering, organizing, and collaborating on travel plans. The playful branding elements, including the Roam logo and soft color palette, were designed to evoke excitement and ease around group travel. Each screen—from the onboarding flow to trip management—was carefully refined to be mobile-first, ensuring that navigation and interactions felt natural across devices. The result is a cohesive, polished product that not only meets functional needs but also enhances the overall planning experience.
Usability Testing
I built an interactive prototype in Figma and performed a mix of moderated/unmoderated tests with 5 participants. I asked participants to complete 3 tasks: Creating a Trip, Starting a Group Sync, and Building an Itinerary.
After synthesizing results I mind mapped the feedback into categories based on the feedback being positive/critical and focused on design and features or the organization and flow as seen below or here in FigJam
Priority Revisions
Some of the feedback I received from the usability tests was critical but came from the perspective of a user using a product for the first time, so wasn’t immediately a candidate for revisions.
There was some feedback that was good for revisions. One of which being able to quickly jump back into the planning flow from the home page, i.e. the user has created a trip and the next step is to start the group sync, vs. having to go into the trips tab and find the specific trip and then enter the flow. To resolve this I added a box at the top of the Home Page giving notice to the user they can pick up where they left off by clicking this button.
Learnings
This was my first UX design project so everything was new going through the end-to-end design. I especially felt the importance of utilizing the design process to progress through building a product and keeping information organized. I learned the value of each step within Research, Ideation, Design, and Deliver and have been able to utilize those in various combinations in my later projects.
Next Steps
Add more group features, such as group chat, to make the experience more live and interactive for users while planning their trip. In addition, more planning tools after doing the Group Sync to make the itinerary more customizable.
Explore making the product compatible with outside apps like Google calendar, email to give users flexibility in utilizing their trip plan while they’re traveling.
