Reimagining Trip Planning: Designing Intripid’s AI-Powered Trip Builder
Date
December, 2024
Role
Lead Product Designer
Organization
Intripid
Services
User-Centered Design, Intuitive User Interface (UI), Visual Design, Responsiveness and Accessibility
👋 Introduction
Picture this - you’re planning a trip. Excitement kicks in, but so does the overwhelm. Flights, hotels, sightseeing, food, and the perfect balance between adventure and relaxation, it’s all a puzzle. Whether you're a traveler crafting your own adventure or a travel advisor curating a seamless experience, the process can quickly become chaotic.
That’s where Intripid’s Trip Builder comes in.
At its core, building a trip is more than just picking destinations, it's about selecting and arranging activities over time for the travelers who will actually embark on the journey. The goal? A personalized, well-structured itinerary that feels effortless.
Intripid’s Trip Builder empowers both travelers and travel advisors to take control of their itineraries with an intuitive, AI-assisted workspace. It’s a tool designed to transform scattered ideas into a beautifully organized trip - effortless, collaborative, and tailored to every traveler’s needs.
But designing this tool was no small feat. As the sole Product Designer at Intripid, my challenge was to craft a system that was powerful yet simple, structured yet flexible - a tool that felt like magic, yet worked like a well-oiled machine.
This is the story of how we built it.
🧐 Understanding the Problem
Planning a trip is an exciting but overwhelming task. Travelers and travel advisors often struggle with scattered information, disorganized schedules, and the challenge of balancing multiple activities within a structured itinerary. Traditional planning methods - spreadsheets, note-taking apps, and back-and-forth messages - lack real-time collaboration, flexibility, and AI-driven assistance, making the process inefficient and frustrating.
For travelers, the problem lies in organizing their ideal trip without missing details, while for travel advisors, it's about seamlessly curating itineraries for clients without repetitive manual work. Both need a tool that not only simplifies itinerary creation but also adapts to changing preferences, schedules, and collaboration needs.
The challenge was clear: How might we design a Trip Builder that is intuitive, structured, and smart, empowering users to effortlessly create, modify, and personalize their trips with ease?
🚩 Defining the Challenge
After identifying the core problems, the next step was to break down the design process and explore how to create a seamless, intelligent, and collaborative Trip Builder. This phase involved a structured approach, starting with deep research, mapping user needs, and translating insights into a refined product experience.
🕵 Research
Competitive analysis
I reviewed products like TripAdvisor, Tripit, Wanderlog, Tripoto, Wonderplan, etc., that offer a group booking/planning experience to understand user expectations better and what solutions can be offered. I feel that competitor analysis helps me quickly identify necessary feature aspects, potential pain points and improvements.
Some specific problems with these tools were:
Trip planning, booking, and collaboration are spread across multiple tools instead of being integrated into one seamless platform.
Recommendations are either generic or non-existent, lacking personalization.
Users can’t easily rearrange activities in a visual timeline or calendar view.
Most platforms don’t allow multiple users to edit and adjust an itinerary dynamically.
Without a calendar-based interface, users struggle to see how activities fit into their daily schedule. This results in overlapping plans, inefficient travel routes, and missed experiences.
💡 Designing a Solution
Now, based on the insights from the user research and understanding approach of the similar apps, I tried to jot down the features that I felt would be possible solutions.
User Persona
User Journey
Moodboard
Going online and finding inspirational work from other great designers/organizations is also really key. I drew inspiration from Google Calendar’s structured scheduling, Discord’s seamless navigation, and Samsung’s software UI to create an experience that was both intuitive and efficient.
Dribbble is my go to website that I visit every day just to keep up to date with the new trends and look for inspiration when starting out with new projects. I also save every dribbble shot that I like and categorize them so that when I start out a new project like this one, I can easily filter out the ones that could help me come up with a great design.After gathering a few designs similar to the design I aim for, I create a moodboard which I use along the way to inspire myself in case I get stuck.
Wire-framing
Layout
Lo-Fi
Visual Designs (🖥️ Desktop Version)
Once the functionality was refined, the final step was crafting a visually engaging UI that aligned with Intripid’s brand identity.
Scheduler View
Understanding the Components
Inviting Travelers to the Trip
Collaboration is a key part of Intripid, and these screens highlights the ability to invite new travelers or add existing connections to the trip. Users can share their itinerary with others, allowing for real-time input, modifications, and shared trip planning, making group travel more coordinated and hassle-free.
Adding an Activity in Scheduler View
These screens demonstrates the ability to set detailed parameters for an activity within the Trip Builder’s scheduler view. Users can precisely configure each activity by defining: Location, Category, Title, DateTime begin, DateTime end. With these features, users can effortlessly manage activities, ensuring a well-structured and collaborative itinerary-building experience.
Itinerary View
Visual Designs (📱Mobile Version)
Adapting the Trip Builder’s complex functionality into a mobile-friendly experience came with several challenges. The goal was to ensure users could seamlessly plan, modify, and collaborate on trips despite the constraints of a smaller screen.
Unlike the desktop version, which had ample space to display the scheduler, activity panel, and AI suggestions simultaneously, the mobile interface required a more focused and intuitive approach. Key actions had to be prioritized, ensuring users could efficiently interact with their itinerary without feeling overwhelmed.
To tackle these challenges, I drew inspiration from Google Calendar’s structured scheduling, Discord’s seamless navigation, and Samsung’s software UI to create an experience that was both intuitive and efficient.
Scheduler View
Itinerary View
