TripFetch
How providing vacation tracking tools solves low employee vacation usage
Role
UX Designer
Tools
Figma, Miro, Marvel
Timeline
10 Weeks
Background
In the wake of a global pandemic, this felt concerning in a way that shook me to my globe-trotting roots. Taking vacations doesn't just mean a trip to the beach, it plays a fundamental role for our mental health by establishing a healthy work life balance.
I decided to do more research, and eventually take on this project as a full UX case study.
As someone who loves to travel, vacations allowed me to see the world while taking a break from day-to-day office life. However, that was not the case for everyone.
As I was visiting a friend who had just returned from a trip to Puerto Rico, we began to discuss an article highlighting Americans’ low vacation use. We both agreed we’d witnessed similar behavior in our workplaces. Simply put, people in this country very rarely take a break.
My Personal Interest
The Solution
The Problem
My UX Process
Employees are losing their vacations due to a lack of advanced planning.
Design an app that helps users plan all their vacations in advance, plus share and discover inspiring trip destinations through a network of global travelers, eliminating low vacation use and helping achieve a work-life balance for our users.
News headlines continued to highlight the problem…
The Average American Uses Only About Half of Their Vacation Days a Year
Research shows employees prioritize their work schedules over vacation planning for months, even years. Altogether, the average American is saying they’re too busy to plan a vacation.
The most effective way to combat this dilemma, proposed one article, is to plan vacations as early in the year as possible.
2° Research
Hypothesis
Planning all their vacations early in the year will help users utilize all their vacation time.
To validate the hypothesis using primary research, I sent out a screener survey to 15 employees across my network.
I identified 5 employees who reported leaving over half of their vacation days unused in the last year. I conducted semi-structured interviews with them in order to gain insight into the different ways they manage their annual vacation days and struggles they experience along the way.
Research Questions:
How would you describe the culture at your company concerning employees taking vacation?
What does vacation planning usually look like for you?
Could you tell me about a vacation which you’ve planned in the past?
Do you have any experiences where you considered planning a vacation and didn’t?
Are there any difficulties you encounter when considering what to do with vacation days?
Primary Research
Define
Grouping similar interview responses helped me understand how users’ most common pain-points in vacation planning stemmed from various personality traits related to lack of experience advance planning.
Similar traits and pain-points were shared across interviewees who all suffered from low vacation usage. Similarities included:
Aspirations to take more vacations
Rarely plan things far in advance
Lack of big vacation planning experience
Taking shorter vacations as a result of lack of planning
Our User Persona
Synthesizing the affinity map findings into a user persona helped me consciously make human-centered design decisions based on research and interviews.
Pain Points: Planning ahead
Goals: To use vacation days to travel more frequently
Needs: Planning help
“I haven’t taken a day off in a full year.”
Jobs To Be Done
What are our users’ underlying needs?
I wrote Jobs to be Done Statements to help me narrow down the underlying reasons behind our user’s desire to travel more.
My first time using this method, I was surprised how insightful the results turned out to be. I determined our users wanted to use more vacation to accomplish four points:
How Might We Statements
Focusing on users who require motivation and assistance in planning their vacations, I constructed questions that would bring us into Ideation.
Using what I learned from the Jobs to be Done Statements and the sum of the research data to construct How Might We Statements brought me one step closer to designing a solution.
How might we motivate employees to utilize more of their vacation?
How might we facilitate employees' ability to take vacation?
How might we inspire employees to experience new adventures?
How might we encourage employees to improve their work life balance?
How might we encourage employees to take full advantage of their vacation days?
How might we facilitate employees’ ability to schedule their vacations in advance?
I then identified the three foundational user journeys that would deliver the most value to users with this product.
Onboarding Vacation Wizard
Focusing on helping users utilize their vacation days, I decided to integrate an onboarding wizard that requires users input their number of vacation days at the onset of the app setup. This way, users could use the app as a vacation time tracker, easily alerting them of what days they have available to use at all times.
User Journeys
Creating a New Travel Itinerary
Remembering this app’s fundamental role as a planning app, I designed a user flow to allow users to create their own trip itinerary from scratch
Filter and Find Vacation Ideas
A crucial component to motivating users to take their vacations is to create excitement for the all the possibilities waiting for them in the world of travel. Taking inspiration from Airbnb, I designed a user flow allowing users to search and filter endless trip itineraries, offering them a glimpse of the world of possibilities awaiting them.
Design
Sketching allowed me to draw out my user flows with added interactions and visual UI elements to guide the user through the app’s features.
Keeping our user persona Kyle in mind, several interactions were added to encourage an engaging experience . Visual elements compliment the user journey while robust navigation control provided user control and freedom.
Paper Prototype Testing
Conducting usability tests on my sketch prototype revealed the onboarding wizard bogged-down users early on.
I went back and re-drew screens after the tests, removing the onboarding wizard and creating a tab that allows the user to input vacation days.
Wireframes
With the first round of testing completed, I created wireframes with the new vacation management and tracking page, finalizing the layout of my app.
The new page would need to allow users to view and adjust their vacation data, much like an HR Management system. The difference here would be that this Vacation Tracker would be a tool using gamification to encourage users to allocate their vacation days for future trips each quarter.
Style Guide Design
With the app’s foundation in place, I created a Design Style Guide that represented TripFetch’s lively, inspirational, and motivating feel.
Early Designs
Designing in high-fidelity was a learning process with considerable improvements in my design.
Wireframe
Iteration 1
Final Screen
Wireframe
Iteration 1
Final Screen
Wireframe
Iteration 1
Final Screen
Usability Testing
I conducted usability tests, and organized user feedback into priority-based ‘Usability Issues’ spreadsheets
I would then begin solving the most critical issues first, moving down the list until I had solved all significant pain points.
Round One Usability Issues
Round Two Usability Issues
Essential UI updates included:
• Updated UX writing for clarity
• Modernized the Filter UI for better usability
• Simplified features on Vacation Tracker to stay within narrow project scope
Final Screens
By the second round of usability testing, users were completing the tasks I asked them to perform, reassuring me that users would be able to use the app as I had envisioned during initial research.
Filter and Find Vacation Ideas
Seamless Onboarding
Add and Track Vacation Days
My Final Prototype
Summary
Unexplored Features
I would have loved to explore adding many more tools to the application such as:
• Creating collaborate trip playlists through Spotify
• Suggesting experiences to explore nearby: restaurants, food tours, music venues, etc.
• Direct hotel/flight booking through Airbnb, hotels, airlines, and other travel enterprises
• Adding social features to the Profile, allowing for users to meet new friends through TripFetch as tour guides/local experts and fri
Real-World Validation
An important aspect to any project aiming to solve behavioral pain-points is real-world validation. In this instance, I was able to ensure real world usability of my app, but in order to take my design to the next level I would contact the employees with low vacation usage who I interviewed to test the app features, measuring whether TripFetch succeeds in its aim to increasing employee vacation usage, and ultimately improving employee’s mental-health.
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This Case Study taught me about the trade-off designers are forced to make when complexity can lead features outside of scope and left me with the questions for what the future holds for a project tackling low vacation usage.
Learnings
I would have liked to have dug deeper into the Vacation Tracker which I was forced to leave behind. It was an exciting feature which I began to design for to the different ways that employees accrue and categorize their vacation (Vacation vs PTO, Sick, Holiday, etc.)
Designing these wireframes was a significant undertaking which taught me how complexity can arise unexpectedly while designing app product features. In the future, this would be an interesting feature to explore and test further.