SUMMARY
✈️ Redesigning the Group Travel Planning Experience
As part of my Capstone with Expedia Group, our team was challenged to reimagine how group travel is planned and managed. We focused on improving the Expedia mobile app to reduce friction, stress, and confusion for users planning trips with others.
We had the unique opportunity to conduct research at Expedia’s Headquarters in Seattle, using their User Testing Center to gather insights directly from target users.
📱 About the Expedia App
The Expedia mobile app is an all-in-one travel companion that allows users to plan, book, and manage their trips, while earning rewards, all from one place.
The Challenge
Trip planning is too overwhelming—especially in groups.
With countless options for flights, stays, and activities across platforms, travelers often feel decision fatigue and confusion. When it comes to planning with friends or family, things get even messier—leading to miscommunication, lost details, and financial disorganization.
Our Approach
Make group planning simpler, clearer, and more collaborative.
We introduced three core features into the Expedia app to support shared decision-making and reduce complexity:
Trip Overview Dashboard – A centralized space to see the full itinerary at a glance.
Live Expense Tracker – Real-time budgeting and cost-splitting tools.
Trip-specific Group Chat – Chat about the trip on the app as opposed to a separate messaging platform
DISCOVERY
Our Initial Research
Teaming up with Expedia meant diving deep into the research they had already done. After sifting through their findings and doing some digging of our own, we pinpointed three key insights to use as our jumping-off points.
Our user
Users are ages 30-45, typically planning for groups of 3-4
Source: Expedia Group
Current Trends
Mobile booking is growing rapidly, indicating a shift towards more convenient and accessible travel planning
Source: Sia, P.Y. -H., Saidin, S.S. and Iskandar, Y.H.P.
Everyone has their own method
Frequent travelers tend to stick with what they know, often resisting change
Source: Expedia Group
Competitive Analysis
We turned to competitive analysis to help us understand the landscape, identify industry standards, and uncover opportunities for innovation.
HMW
With our discovery research, our first HMW iteration was created
How might we redesign Expedia’s mobile app’s Trips page to better support group travel planning, using methods that travelers find intuitive and comfortable?
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Based on our initial findings, we selected three different qualitative research approaches to explore our insights more thoroughly.
As the team lead for this phase, I prioritized choosing methods that would build on each other. We began with broad exploration and gradually funneled our research into deeper “why’s” to uncover meaningful results.
Surveys
We surveyed 48 people on Instagram, Reddit, and Slack about their Expedia experiences, gathering diverse insights. Using sticky notes on FigJam, we organized our findings into four categories.
Tools: Google Forms + FigJam
FigJam Note sorting
Insights
Organization Issues
Pain: Managing shared travel info is difficult.
Desire: Better sorting features
Preferred Tools
Desire: Notion is favored for its flexible and robust organizational features
Itinerary Detail
Desire: customizable and detailed itinerary templates
Time and Collaboration
Pain: Coordination
Desire: Collaborative tools similar to Google Suite capabilities
Field Observations/Interviews
We used our survey to create questions and tasks for deeper insights. We conducted nine 30-minute sessions, combining interviews and field observations.
Interviews gave detailed feedback, while observations showed how users interacted with the current Expedia app and other planning apps, revealing important user behaviors and preferences.
Tools: FigJam
Insights
Trip planning tools
Users used tools such as Google Flights, Chase Travel, and Google Docs for collaborative planning and researched affordability, safety, and destinations
Communication
Group Coordination involved messaging apps, social media, and collaborative tools for planning.
Budgeting
Users often had preset budgets and lacked patience to continually recalculate trip costs.
Desired features
Users sought enhanced collaboration, clearer pricing, better itinerary planning, and improved pricing comparison in travel apps.
Design Goals
Using our qualitative research, we grouped our interview insights into 4 major groups for us to use as a guideline for user needs & desires throughout our design process.
Enhanced Collaboration
Incorporate features that facilitate collaborative trip planning and decision-making within travel apps, such as shared itinerary planning, group chat functionality, and real-time collaboration tools.
Comfort
Produce an application that stems off planning strategies users are already comfortable with.
Desired Features
Incorporate features that provide users with a complete overview of their entire trip, and price transparency to track budget throughout the trip.
Personalization
Allow freedom to accommodate many different user preferences.
HMW
With our new insights, we refined our HMW…
How might we redesign Expedia’s mobile app’s Trips page to better support and simplify group travel planning, ensuring it accommodates collaborative efforts and utilizes methods that travelers find intuitive, comfortable, and personalized?
DESIGN
Making our app Intuitive & Comfortable
Intuitiveness and comfort come with familiarity. We designed two views that users are likely familiar with:
Calendar view: a quick snapshot of the trip
Itinerary view: streamlines trip planning by displaying both confirmed bookings and saved activities on a unified timeline
Calendar
1st Iteration
Overly stacked events lack organization and suggest a false timeline
Cannot see everything all at once
2nd Iteration
Familiar standard calendar view
Rid of x-axis scrolling, adds and expands rows contingent on content mass
more intuitive button flow to a separate detailed timeline itinerary page + offers ability to duplicate button navigation to place elsewhere
Mid-fi
Itinerary
Low-fi
Invites collaboration for decision making
Mid-fi
Information Architecture
Three other key components of trip planning were budgeting, chatting, and booking. Designing these elements was straightforward, but the real challenge was integrating all the components into a seamless, intuitive flow.
USER TESTING
We identified 3 task flows that represented the most important actions to be accomplished for trip planning.
Testing was done in Expedia’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington. We were able to use their user testing center to record and monitor our participants decisions, while prompting them with tasks from an adjacent room
Tasks
View and understand the itinerary
Make a decision with the group about an activity
Check and understand if the trip is within budget
We gauged success by asking participants questions and seeing if their answers reflected our goals.
Insights
The itinerary was difficult to read
Could not distinguish different types of cards
Crammed contents in cards
Commenting feature was not intuitive to find
After feedback
Developed diverse card designs to display essential information
Streamlined the interface for a less overwhelming appearance
Enhanced intuitive indicators for saved or booked items
The chat did not have many features
Limited to messages only
Abrupt blocks do not align with design system
After feedback
Can feature itinerary items
Poll for simpler decision-making
Cleaner design
The budget took too long to understand
Too much unnecessary content
Added x-axis scrolling
After feedback
Quick at-a-glance look
Quick bill recorder feature
FINAL THOUGHTS
The standout experience of this project was the opportunity to visit Expedia HQ, where I conducted user testing with their participants and equipment. I also had the privilege of working with a highly efficient team and learning from exceptional mentors.
Key Takeaways:
Simplicity is Powerful: I tend to overload screens with too much information, but user testing underscored the effectiveness of a more streamlined approach. Less truly is more.
The Power of Questions: Asking questions, whether to participants, mentors, or team members, proved invaluable. It not only deepened our understanding but also sparked meaningful discussions that propelled the project forward.
A Passion for Research: Research is embedded in every stage of the design process, but I particularly enjoyed engaging with participants. Understanding their perspectives and uncovering the underlying "whys" behind their thoughts and actions was a highlight for me
FINAL DESIGN
View Interactive Prototype: Figma Prototype