Odyssey, a mobile app that connects users with trustworthy travel recommendations
My role: As Lead Product Designer, I took ownership of the design from start to finish. I was responsible for conceptualizing, creating wireframes, user testing, and high-fidelity designs.
Team: 2 designers, 3 researchers
Timeline: 2 months
Methods: Think aloud, contextual inquiry, directed storytelling, storyboarding, cardsorting, survey
Project Overview
Problem
Travelers are inundated with recommendations, and it's difficult to know which to trust.
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Between travel influencers, sponsored posts, and tourism boards, travelers struggle to identify genuine recommendations. This leads to a lack of confidence when planning travel.
Opportunity
How can we help travelers feel more confident in their choices when travel planning?
Solution
Odyssey, a platform that connects users with honest, authentic travel recommendations.
Users trust Odyssey because the platform highlights personal connection.
Reviews are either written by friends and friends-of-friends (who the user is familiar with) or by locals (who are familiar with the destination.)
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Research
Understanding what travelers want
To understand how travelers plan trips, my team and I conducted six think-alouds where we asked participants to plan a hypothetical trip to New York City. They narrated their thoughts and feelings as they researched lodging, restaurants, and activities.
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We found that travelers struggle to identify trustworthy travel recommendations.
"In general I think reviews are a little biased. People are always more motivated to leave a review if they had a negative experience, so you may not see as many positive reviews."
– Think-aloud participant
"When I see a sponsored review I'm not sure if it's trustworthy. If it's from an influencer or a tourism board, they're obviously being paid to leave a positive review."
– Think-aloud participant
What makes a travel recommendation "trustworthy"?
We conducted additional research via a card sorting activity and a survey to identify key characteristics of trustworthy travel recommendations.
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Card sorting helped us understand how travelers would rank various sources of travel recommendations and understand the value of each. We then developed specific hypotheses from their answers, and used the survey to validate our assumptions.
Screenshot from a card sorting session
Screenshots from of survey results
Quantitative insights from survey
1. Over 50% of people consider visuals a key part of a travel recommendation
2. 33% of participants said they wished they had asked lcoals for recommendations when planning trips.
3. 77% of participants have a high level of trust in travel recommendations from their friends.
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To isolate more qualitative feedback, I led an affinity clustering session with the goal of identifying recurring themes.
Qualitative insights:
1. Travelers are more trusting of recommendations if they have a personal connection to the recommender, such as a friend or even a friend of a friend.
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2. Similarly, travelers are more trusting of recommendations if the recommender has a personal connection to the place, such as a local.
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3. High-quality visuals and specific details can make a recommendation come across as more authentic. Many travelers said they were more likely to follow a recommendation with high quality photos.
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4. People are generally distrustful of any recommendation primarily motivated by money, such as sponsored ads or posts from influencers.
Ideation
How would a customer find recommendations?
I created a journey map to define the user experience when searching a trip
This helped me to understand what needs to go in the app.
Wireframes
I wanted to test the concept of the app with users, as well as create a more concrete map of the user flow.
Feedback on wireframes
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In the initial designs, participants were concerned about the length of reviews.
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Many said that while they would find the reviews helpful, they wondered who would write them.
In short, there was lack of incentive for users to post.
Prototyping
How can we make it easier for users to share reviews?
In order to reduce friction when posting a review, I shortened the reviews and chunked steps of the review process into small parts.
Introducing tags also helped shorten reviews.
Tags have several benefits, such as:
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1. Users can convey the same sentiment with a simple tap, rather than typing out a long passage on mobile.
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2. Improved searchability and organization.
Information architecture
After revisiting research and remembering how important visuals are to users, I hypothesized that making visuals more prominent will make posts more engaging. When I conducted A/B testing with users, 80% preferred Version B.
Content Strategy
I was also responsible for crafting the voice and tone of the app. To honor Odyssey's commitment to personal connections, I wanted the language to sound familiar and informal, while remaining clear.
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I did this by using words that communicate a connection, like "friend". I also tried to establish a connection between the user and Odyssey by referring to the app as "us" and addressing the user directly.
Final Design
Odyssey uses a social network system, similar to LinkedIn, to connect users with people they know and people who know the travel destination.
Four types of connections:
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Primary: Friends you have connected with
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Secondary: Friends of friends
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Tertiary: Friends of friends of friends
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Locals: Users who have confirmed they live in a specific destination.
Feed shows users posts made by their connections and user with whom they have mutual connections.
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Explore shows posts from locals in a chosen destination.
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Users can search for recommendations in a chosen destination, and filter results by distance, connection, and tag.
Short posts make it easy to contribute and search through recommendations. No more skimming a lengthy article to see if this is a worthwhile destination.
Impact & Learnings
Impact
I asked users to rank their confidence in various travel recommendation sources. Reviews on Odyssey ranked the highest.
I asked how likely users would be to make content about a trip on a variety of platforms. Reviews on Odyssey ranked 2nd highest, indicating that my designs had begun to address the issues related to incentive.
Final Thoughts
This process showed me how important ongoing, iterative research is. If I had stopped after the initial research phase and created the first proposed version of Odyssey, it would not actually be valuable to users. Conducting additional research and iterative testing let me check in with users and see if the product fit their needs.
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If I were to continue working on this, I would do a deep dive into incentives and how to motivate users to post more. I would look to platforms like Glassdoor, which require users to share information before viewing what others have posted, or Google Reviews, which promises perks to frequent posters.