Planning a day trip with friends should be fun, not stressful! Daytrip, a new app developed by Drexel University’s User Experience and Interaction Design (UXID) students, simplifies collaborative trip planning with enhanced discoverability, flexible itineraries, and robust route details.
The Challenge: Simplifying Group Travel Planning
Many travel apps exist, but often fall short when it comes to group planning. They’re bogged down with unnecessary features focused on selling hotels and curated trips, rather than the core experience. The Daytrip team aimed to create a streamlined solution focused on user experience and collaboration.
The Daytrip Team
- Molyna Tep (Project Manager/UX Designer)
- Megan Lam (UX/UI Designer)
- Tynan Drake (UX/UI Designer)
- Allison Drake (UX Researcher)
- Parker Nix (Front-End Dev)
- Kyle Dolphin (Front-End Dev)
- Andrew Stein (Back-End Dev)
Project Goals
The Daytrip team set out to:
- Understand the target audience through research and competitive analysis.
- Design user-friendly prototypes and iterate based on feedback.
- Build a comprehensive design library for seamless development.
- Develop a working web app with MVP functions and integrated APIs.
The Daytrip Solution: Collaboration at its Core
Daytrip addresses the frustrations of group planning with key features designed for seamless collaboration:
Research-Driven Design
The team’s design decisions were driven by thorough research:
- Competitor Analysis: Identified cluttered interfaces and missing collaboration features in existing apps.
- User Interviews & Surveys: Confirmed the importance of collaborative planning, with 88.1% of survey respondents planning trips with friends.
Key Features for Seamless Planning
- Events Tab: Highlights seasonal activities and weather trends to help users discover destinations.
- Saved & Collections: Allows users to save places and organize them into custom collections.
- Custom Stops: Enables users to incorporate social events and locations not found on traditional maps.
- Group Suggestions: Allows users to contribute to trip plans and vote on suggested locations.
- Itinerary: Provides a centralized view of the planned trip, with clear roles for organizers and participants.
Visual Design for Usability
Daytrip prioritizes usability with a simplified brand identity, limited color palette, and semantic use of color to represent activity types.
Development and Technology
The team used Flutter and Dart for the app’s development, creating reusable components and dynamic layouts that pull data from a custom database and the Google Maps API.
The Results
Daytrip is currently a beta app accessible through TestFlight. Despite the app not being fully developed, the team is satisfied with all the results they made. With the help of a promotional video, the team was able to highlight key features. Early user testing demonstrated the app’s ease of use and generated positive feedback.