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Attechi

A digital toolkit to plan, store, guide and share your travel experience so you can travel hassle-free with your friends & families.

Overview

How difficult is it to plan a decent trip?

We imagine ourselves to be one of the character in movies like "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara", "Dil Chahta Hai" or "The Motorcycle Diaries", when we think about planning a trip with our friends. We get inspired by those adventures, breath-taking landscapes and friendly dialogues. And just like that, travel has turned from "doing" things to "feeling" things! We are inclined to more of a "self-actualisation" or a Transformative journey, where we want more than just a simple visit. "Instead, the travel they’re seeking is an experience of the world that goes deep — one that changes them in ways they may not even be aware of."

Coming back to how those movies inspire us, they really don't reflect on the other side of calling friends, planning, hustling through busy time schedules, multiple cancellations and other frustrations. Most of the time we forget that our needs to travel more have increased as our lifestyle becomes busier & dynamic. And while we get our tables piled up with more & more constraints, we can't devote time & mental peace to take out a world map and plan our next trip from scratch!

Brief

Travelling to new places is one of the most rewarding experiences, even more so when you plan it with your friends. Through this project, I'll create a shared experience to plan itinerary, document relevant trip items and allocate bills & budgeting. The idea is to think of what more features the experience could accommodate in different user-journeys to aid the experience for travellers and explorers in groups while also considering local & student related unique constraints.

Mapping how we plan trips

I started quickly by making a rough journey map of - How I plan out MY travel. I divided this razzle-dazzle into 4 phases: Dreaming, Planning, Booking, and finally Experiencing.

The intent is to understand the bigger picture, stakeholders & possible constraints and to build upon it. So while doing primary researches, I would be able to identify significant gaps and connect the dots.

Fig 1: Journey of planning & experience a trip divided into "Dreaming it", "Planning it", "Booking it" and "Experiencing it"

Literature Reviews

Mobile Behaviours
"With travel, micro-moments happen throughout the consumer journey" ..."When these moments happen, we reach for the device nearest to us for answers—and that device is increasingly a smartphone. In the past year, mobile's share of travel visits has grown by 48%, and, because mobile is helping people find what they want more quickly, time spent per session on mobile travel sites is down 7%, while mobile web conversion rates for travel sites have grown 88%."

Travel trends: 4 mobile moments changing the consumer journey
Lisa Gevelber, Oliver Heckmann

Millenials & Travelling"Nearly six in ten Millennials (58%) say they enjoy traveling for leisure with their friends– nearly 20 points higher than older generations"..."Millennials are also more likely to travel with friends or to places friends
have visited. The female heads of household are clearly the decision makers, more so than in other age group."

Meet the Millennials: Insights for DestinationsPGAV Destinations

Importance of Local GuidesThe local guides, Corbett says, made it feel more like an “experience” rather than someone just taking you around to show you sights. This is what agencies are selling: the idea that you’re not “sightseeing” in a country but “experiencing” it.

How travel agencies avoided extinction and became a luxury service.Aditi Shrikant, Vox

"Esteem" to "Self-Actualisation""54 percent of travellers said transformation was an important aspect of traveling. In Skift’s 2018 report “The Rise of Transformative Travel,” Beth McGroarty, says travel is now seen as a “shortcut” or “shake-up.” The global travel economy is shiftingfrom a focus on “esteem” to “self-actualization,” and travelers are buying services that they perceive as being able to induce quick and complete change.

The rise of transformative travel.Skift

Contextual Inquiry

Understanding their behaviours, rituals, expectations and all tantrums while planning a trip.

While there are enough services out there which offer great user experiences to ease our trip planning - I was curious about why it is still something that "itches" people. Why are most of our trips get stuck in the planning stage? While secondary research, facts and numbers provided a base for this - I was brainstorming about what I can ideate upon that hasn't been explored fully yet.
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My aim then was to bridge this gap by studying these nuances/analogies around planning a trip - to make this platform more humanised like your personal city guide. And to get this holistic understanding of "How people plan out their Trips", I planned an ethnographic study with some travellers who were planning a trip. (Kudos to Aditya & Eisha - if they are reading this :) I went to their places and tried to indulge in their way of creating an itinerary.
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*I took part in co-creating the itinerary to an extent where I don't influence their phases of planning a trip.*

Key Insights from Contextual Inquiry

  • Everyone from the groups kept on researching even after finishing the bookings.

  • Everyone had at least one unique dream to experience from the trip, even if they all are going together.
    They usually make up a list of it, saying "Yeh to dekhna hai pakka se"

  • They get excited to look at those websites which mentioned something very specifics that they want; like Covid Safety Stay, Spring Mattress etc.

  • While planning the trip, they also demand it to be a little unknown or at least with some free time; So that they can accommodate if something interesting comes up on the trip.

  • They won't mind paying a little extra if they get what they want.

  • And of course, how about it over chai?

Interviews

Understanding their behaviours, rituals, expectations and all tantrums while planning a trip.

Insights from Contextual Inquiry generated some interesting questions, which I thought would be useful to analyse more. I asked a few people about their recent travels experiences.

I tried to keep the conversation open-ended with some prompts so that I could even note out the subconscious decisions!

Some conversations starters
I used -

  • How do you plan your trip?

  • Are you a solo traveller or you like exploring in groups?

  • What are the first few things you do after reaching your destination.

  • Do you prefer to check in first? Or to visit places around?

Key Insights from Interviews

  • "Deciding where to go, takes most of the time!" x2

  • "Feeling shy to ask friends to contribute."

  • "We all live in different cities. Usually whenever we plan a trip, everyone arrives to a kind of checkpoint city and then start the trip."

  • "Keeping all the documents together is a big task! I do this little hack to forward all those documents to a pinned group (with just me) on Whatsapp!"

  • "In covid times, its difficult to meet up somewhere offline."

  • "I like historical places. So I usually start by randomly surfing on google about historical places in ____ (dash)."

  • "We usually get a Classmate Register and keeps on entering the expenses
    like who paid what?"

  • "I get bad dreams that I kept on sleeping and I missed the train."

  • "I don't plan out everything from A to Z. I just checkout which tickets are cheaper, how many days are we going for, and when I'm reaching where. I'm that kind of traveller who doesn't like to read on Wiki while walking in a fort!"

The goal is simple, make travelling in a group fun again.

A lot of "travelling dreams" gets away scrapped in the early stages because of the lack of interest in planning a complete vacation. To make it worse, the pandemic made it difficult to even enjoy those fun moments for friends to come together and plan out everything.

Through this project, I tried to make this experience hassle-free, from the Dreaming State to the Experiencing State. The idea is to make a digital experience that will target all those highlighted constraints from my research and at the same time, didn't lose the anticipated chaos & human touch in travelling.

Explore

For your upcoming trip:

Automatically identifies location from your 'Trips' and showcases places/things to do near that location

Where your friends are travelling:

Share & Recommend places visited/saved by your ‘Friends’.

Might interest you:

Would recommend Categories of places (like Historical, Adventurous) as defined by the use in the Application Setup.

Popular in this season

“Monsoon in Kerala,” “Winters in Shimla,” and “Summers in Ladakh.” There are so many insight about how people decide their destination. One of the biggest factor, from my research, is Weather. These dynamic cards would showcase the best place for this time of the year.

My Trips

  • Showcases every Trips (ongoing and upcoming)

  • Provides a share button, which will redirect and let the
    user forward the whole itinerary.

  • The option button will open the editing page, where user
    can Add/Remove Fields or Delete Trip altogether.

"Plan a new trip" will snap to the right of the screen,
giving an option to make new trip.

Inviting Friends
Collaborative Calendar
"Guys! Fill it up man.
When do you
want to go?"

"Don't forget to bring your hat"

The dashboard displays the live updates and shortcuts to important documents. While the service is equipped with all the interaction points to make the trip seamless, one of the key goals of testing would also be to reflect on accessibility.

Read Full Project Documentation

Nice to e-meet you!

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Let's stay connected.

rachitmathur00@gmail.com