Adding an Itinerary feature to the Culture Trip app

A 4-day UX/UI Design Challenge

For this challenge, we had 4 days to flex our new skills in Sketch by adding a feature to an existing mobile app. I chose The Culture Trip.

The app

The Culture Trip is an app that wants to “inspire people to plan their trips, go beyond their cultural boundaries and connect with the world around them.” It focuses on storytelling rather than “selling” (guided tours, experiences, tickets). Its target users are millenials.

The app is used as follows:

1. User searches for a city
2. User browses and reads articles of interest
3. User saves (bookmarks) articles and/or an individual activity/place/restaurant listed in the article to any of their “Wishlists”

UX Process

So, what is missing?

Upon examining the app, I discovered quite some “missing” functionalities:

• Not possible to organize Saved Places in any structured format
• Not possible to move Saved Places between Wishlists
• Not possible to remove Saved Places from Wishlist (you have to go back to the original article and unselect the bookmark there)
• Not possible to collaborate on a Wishlist with friends
• Not possible to view your Saved Places together on a map (i.e. no map view toggle available)

The decided to tackle the first missing functionality: the fact that it is currently not possible to organize your saved activities and places in a structured format. While the Wishlist feature does allow you to save everything you like, it quickly becomes a messy, endless list of bookmarked items. This does not provide a great user experience.

Culture Trip wants to help people to plan their trips. Unfortunately, I could not see how you would use the app to quickly relocate e.g. those 3 brunch spots you had saved some weeks ago.

I therefore decided to add a functionality which would allow users to create a trip itinerary, and be able to add their ‘saves’ / ‘bookmarks’ into categories and/or time slots.

For example, a user can create a category called “Breakfast options” and store all of the potential breakfast spots she’s found there. For those who wanted to get even more organized, you could add certain cafes to Day 1-Breakfast, Day 2-Breakfast, and so on.

An additional functionality would be the option of adding your friends as collabotors.

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To validate my hypothesis, I conducted some interviews with millennial travelers to better understand how they typically plan for a city trip. The vast majority said they did research beforehand, planned in a few key items, and preferred to leave the rest somewhat unscheduled and spontaneous. The majority of people mentioned that they did not know of a simple, straight-forward tool to share and store ideas with their co-travelers.

From here, I narrowed down the idea to creating a simple, uncomplicated ‘scheduling’ or ‘itinerary’ feature. The idea is that it would allow users to save and organize their finds and share this with their co-travelers.

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) helped me lay out the main, functional, emotional and social ‘jobs’ the feature would complete.

Next, I went on to create some low-fidelity wireframes to test out my concept and make sure it was easily understood.

Low-fidelity wireframes

UI Process

At this point I moved on to Sketch!

I started by importing some screenshots to analyze the colors, typeface and icons, in order to set up the Design System.

Design System

Next, I added in the new feature — dubbed ‘Trips’ — staying consistent to the original UI.

High-fidelity Mockup

The workflow to create a new Trip can be viewed below:

Below you can compare the original vs. re-designed UI, i.e. ‘inside’ a wishlist vs. a trip.The new feature aims to add a better overview and organization for the user.

Note that the user would be able to ‘long press’ and drag each saved place to another ‘bucket’.