A user experience design of travel planning by using metaphor

Abstract

Along with the growth of location-based systems and the Internet, our behaviors on travel and the interactions with technology have been changing. It is now easier for people to explore places to visit and book flight tickets or hotels through various online services. Moreover, most of us use online maps for navigation when traveling. It gives us attraction suggestions and directions to the places we want to go to in unfamiliar cities or countries. We believed that there are more opportunities which can make use of maps, such as utilizing maps as an organization tool. We recognized that visualization is one of the advantages of maps. It helps our brains process and analyze the locational information. For instance, if we pin several points on the map, we can easily recognize the distribution of these points and arrange them in the same day without going through the traveling time between each location. We proposed a metaphor "Map is a group of bookmarked locations" in order to help people organize travel information. We intended to build integration over trip planning and provide a valuable user experience. Therefore, we interviewed 22 millennials from Hong Kong who love traveling to understand their trip planning and travel experience. Based on our studies, we found a group of human behavior in travel planning and then designed a travel planner integrated with several familiar tools and user interfaces of document editor and map on one platform. Our research also investigated how users interacted with the design prototype and included a few suggestions on building a solution with seamless user experience throughout travel planning.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology