OVERVIEW

I collaborated with 2 designers to develop a Tableau Public tool that helps people plan trips by providing overall costs and cost breakdown for various travel styles.
Team 
Sol Choi 
Hua Fan
​Tuyen Truong
Project Length & Setting
​3 weeks | HCDE 411
Data Sources
Budget Your Trip
List Challenges
Wikipedia
Tools
Tableau
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft PowerPoint
Contributions
Persona Creation
User Research
Data Handling
Paper Sketches
​Design Ideation
Usability Testing
Hi-Fi Creation in Tableau

GOALS

Travelust was inspired by our individual interests for travel and aims to: 

  1. Allow users to view travel costs in various cities depending on the user's spending preferences (budget, midrange, luxurious). 
  2. Offer cost breakdown of selected cities in U.S. Dollars. Breakdown includes lodge, food, transit, and activity. 
  3. Allow users to compare destination costs to help them make informed decisions that match their budget requirements.

USER RESEARCH

Participant Inclusion Criteria
  • Has completed a trip in the past 2 years
  • Played a pivotal role in planning the travel trip
​Findings
5/5 participants ranked lodge, food, transit, and activities as the most important factors in trip planning
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4/5 participants used a variety of websites to get ideas for destinations and activities (Pinterest, Instagram, Google search, etc.)
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5/5 participants claimed that costs play a major role in their decision/planning

DATA SET

In the data cleanup, we removed 21 destinations from the 100 travel destinations provided by List Challenges because those destinations either had missing or suspicious data that would not have been valuable in our final product.

*Suspicious data is defined as destinations with subcategories that did not add up to the total overall cost. 

*Missing data was identified when Budget Your Trip didn't have information for the destinations provided by List Challenges.  

DESIGN DECISION

Using major findings from the user research, we decided to create a comprehensive tool that allows users to be able to view overall costs and cost breakdown of lodge, food, transit and activities. 
Ideation of Possible Features
Initial Paper Sketch
Med-Fi Interactive Prototype Using Microsoft PowerPoint

USABILITY TESTING

We hosted a gallery-style usability testing session where we displayed our medium-fi prototype and asked 6 participants 3 questions: 
  1. Was there anything you expected to happen but didn't? 
  2. How effective are the filters in helping you narrow down your search? 
  3. Is it intuitive how the three graphs are linked together? 

​Key Takeaways 
1. Add instructions at the beginning of the landing page to introduce users to the system and how to use it. 
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4. Make table larger since this is the main interface that users interact with. 
2. Make search customizable based on budget preferences for lodge, food, transit, and activity rather than budget preferences for overall trip.
5. The map offers valuable geographic and distance reference, but it's the least used. Make it smaller on the interface.
3. Add checkbox capability to make obvious what is selectable. 

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6. Make labeling for categories and filters more consistent and clear.

FINAL SYSTEM

Key Features
  • Sort/Filter/Rank
  • Detail-On-Demand 
  • Brushing & Linking 
  • Map 
  • Bar Graph
  • Table View 

​Final Interactive Product on Tableau Public

REFLECTION

The biggest obstacle in this project was lack of time. Prior to Travelust, nobody in the team had experience using Tableau, so it was difficult to learn the software while simultaneously using it. There was a lot of trial and error involved with implementing Tableau features and experimenting with what would happen as a result. 

Challenges
  • Data from Budget Your Trip is collected by real peoples' travel experiences. This may lead to inaccurate representations of budget, midrange, and luxurious travel styles because everybody has varying interpretations of travel styles. 
  • We occasionally encountered cities that had outrageous data that was suspicious. For example, traveling luxuriously to Dubai requires an average water cost of $259/day. To reduce chances of providing inaccurate data, our team decided to remove Dubai from our system entirely. 

Future Improvements
  • Allow users to select currency preferences. The current system is only available in USD. 
  • Add more countries instead of the top 100 cities for each travel style because in reality, people may want to visit destinations that are not in our system. 
  • Use real-time data instead of manually collecting and parsing data. This could be achieved by using an API (Budget Your Trip, Trip Advisor, Expedia, etc.).
  • Add images to the Details On Demand for each city upon hovering in the map to add visual appeal.