Ctrip Tripshot
Travel social media, iOS mobile app UX/UI design
Overview
Online Travel Agency (OTA) + Content Creation
Since 2011, more and more people book their hotels, transportations and other travel tickets online rather than through traditional local travel agents. However, since 2018, the growth of the Online Travel Agency (OTA) has declined. At the same time, content creation became more popular. Therefore, Ctrip turned its previous travel journal department into Tripshot with the expectation of the new growth engine.In this project, we created a new travel journal user experience for Ctrip app. The team entered the final round (Top 10) of the company sponsored competition.
My role
User research (User interview, User personas, User journey map, Usability testing)
UX design (Comparative & Competitive analysis, Product strategy, Site map & User flow, Low-fi to Hi-fi Wireframe & Prototyping)
Team & time
4 people including one product manager, one UX designer (me), two UI designers
8 weeks in total
Software
Design and prototype (Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, Axure)
Research and team collaboration (Trello, Zoom, Shimo document, SurveyMonkey)
The Challenge
Tripshot is one of the largest online travel agencies in China. In 2018, the retention rate and activation rate of Ctrip were not hit the company’s business targets. The user research showed that Tripshot users were not satisfied with the existing travel content record and sharing experience within the app. Therefore, the Ctrip team created an online competition for new content creation methods. We, four people from different education backgrounds, job positions, and time zones, grouped together to participate in the competition.
User Research
With the initial phase of user research, we analyzed the general user groups in the user-generated content (UGC) market and in the Ctrip community. We divided the targeted user group into three tiers: Key Opinion Leaders (KOL), Common User, and Visitor. We conducted the user survey and interviews, Then we analyzed with the findings with user persona, empathy map, and AS-IS journey map. You can see detailed user research by click here.
CONCLUSION
Most of existing users only use Tripshot before and after travel. There is a huge opportunity to increase users’ activities during their travel.
Users want to get more travel details in the travel planning duration.
Users usually lack interests or forget to post their travel journals.
Users want to check-in destinations
Brainstorming
We did many times ideations and iterations.
Ideation
We used NUF methods to evaluate ideas and generated the final strategy of the project. According to the voting results, we choose the following strategies as our proposal. We create TO-BE journey map based on the strategies.
Main strategy - Create Journal
7) Uploaded photos will be categorized by location and combined into a photo slideshow or video automatically.
8) Users can use draft box when editing interrupted.
9) Users can create a journal.
Optional strategy - AR Scan
6) Users can scan QR code or search photo on travel spots for detailed travel information.
Notes: the circle size presents the feasible possibility.
Detailed Design
In order to enhance the design, we researched the major competitors and listed their content types and editing user flows. Then, we conducted the new user flow and hi-fi prototype. In addition to the existing post user flow, we created two user flow to meet users’ requirements and solve users’ painpoints, journal, and AR Scan.
Usability Testing
We invited some previous interviewees to evaluate the hi-fi prototype. The user tasks included browsing feeds and journal, and creating new journal. The usability test results showed 100% of users completed user tasks within 10 minutes. 84% of users were clear about the functions of icons and buttons and expressed their exceptions to more interaction in the next version. Here are some feedbacks below.
Visual Design
What Did I Learn
The best strategy comes from our users
We were a brand new remote team with time-zone differences, limited resources, and tight deadlines in the Crip tripshot project. Although this project was under a fast-pacing delivery schedule, we still found time in the first two weeks to do the user research. And the constructive feedback from users helps us prioritize functions and clear out the design patterns.
In the new version of the design, we delivered all requirements from product managers. We preserved the existing customer habits (waterfall feeds browsing methods and nearby feeds category) and created a scalable pattern for new trending features (the photo search and attraction check-in module).