google trek app showing a successful booking.

Travel planning with friends is a bit graph problem and a bit game theory – as the number of participants rises, the number of possible solutions grows exponentially. For the planner, there are often additional burdens associated with setting up a trip. Scouting out trip options, balancing costs and finding common interests in a destination create a complex problem space. For this conceptual redesign, we sought to reduce the time and decision making to 3 simple interactions by offering a curated selection of options based on real-time flight pricing data.

work for
  • Design Sprint
tl;dr
  • Design of a companion app to Google Trips that brings simplicity to the problem of group travel booking.
roles
  • Competitive landscape & strategy.
  • UI
  • Wireframe and flow.
  • Design system library.
A motion study of the calendar animation demonstrating various microinteractions, like a calendar selection screen and a price slider.
The final app flow, demonstrating the basic utilities of the app, including picking dates, selecting a price and defining contacts to travel with.
An early wireframe prototype, which serves as a minimum viable product to enable user evaluation and feedback.
Through brief informal survey, we discovered pain points in travel booking that informed our hypothesis statement.
A hypothesis statement is the essential constraint on any design problem. By crafting a clear statement, we provided a way to focus our design efforts going forward - in this case, identifying location and budget as key pain points.
From the start, it was clear that a niche product like trek would benefit from the data endpoints already available in other google applications. Pricing data could be sourced from google flights and popular city activities would come from google trips. We leveraged this insight into a material-design inspired app.
The high fidelity design the final app bring in a touch of illustration and plenty of animated data visualization interactives, building an alluring yet playful experience.