Personality Travel Matching App

The beginning of bringing my app idea to life

The idea of using Personality Psychology to help match people to places and activities that they would enjoy came to me while I was sitting in a weekly lab meeting for my Threat Perceptions Lab in college. We were going over articles that might pertain to our study and throwing around ideas for how to implement them.

The one that caught my attention was a study linking introversion to preferring a vacation in the mountains, and extroversion to preferring a vacation at the beach. I immediately jumped in and started rambling on about how we could use this on existing travel sites to help narrow down and personalize vacation experiences. I spent the next few days thinking of features and talking to friends about it. I eventually let it go soon after that since I didn't have the technical skills to make it a reality, nor did I know where I would even begin to bring it to life.

Fast forward about 2 years and I have since picked up some skills that are allowing me to finally flesh this idea out. I knew right away that this is was a project I wanted to work through for my UX and Digital Marketing courses. Take a look at what I've got so far:

1.) What will this app do and why?

What are we creating?
- An app that will create a reusable personality profile for each user after answering a few basic questions about their personality. This will be used to match the user to locations and activities that they'll enjoy.

What's worth doing?
- For this, I looked at feasibility and importance to determine which extra features would be worth spending time and resources on. I knew that these might change after some user research.
  - Create group personalities by combining the profiles of multiple users and making recommendations for vacation locations and activities based on this new profile.
  - Prioritize certain members of the group to give their profile more weight (for things like birthday trips or bachelorette parties).
  - Choose group type to make better recommendations
    - (Family, Friends, or Couple)

What value does it provide?
- Creates a reusable profile that can be used multiple times.
- Can get better over time through user reviews and feedback.
- User will spend less time and effort coordinating group vacations.
- Less time spent looking into activities for each location you think of.

Some sketches during the process

Fleshing out features

IA and user flows

2.) Setting up the Navigation

Now that I had my basic features out of the way that I wanted to include, it was time to think about how I would set up a landing page for this app idea.

I started writing down my ideas for what would be most useful and easy, and I then enlisted the help of my family to work through some basic tasks using note cards with my proposed navigation. I gave them each 3 tasks and had them talk out loud while they worked through the navigation cards to accomplish the task. They had some hesitant moments, questions, and suggestions as they went through the process.

I incorporated these changes and clarifications in my second more formal layout sketch, where I also highlighted out the route to value (where I wanted them to try out the app and go on to sign up). Upon my first sketch, I noticed that there were not enough routes to this path, so I added some "Try It" buttons at the top and bottom of useful pages to increase the probability that they would give it a try and eventually sign up.

3.) User Resarch ..... Hang on, would people actually like to use this?

Up until this point, I had only been working through this as practice for understanding the concepts of User Experience AFTER an idea had been validated. Now that I had already done so much work, I was curious as to whether I could ever bring it to market.

I put together a survey on Typeform and started collecting data right away on peoples experiences with coordinating solo and group travel, how interested they were in my app idea, features that THEY would like to see, and I even collected email addresses for people that were interested in staying updated as I worked on it.

Based on my sample, here are some insights that I plan on working with more:

Average Level of Difficulty in planning a solo vacation: 4.9

Average Level of Difficulty in planning a group vacation: 7.0

Average level of Interest in using this app: 8.9

Favorite Extra Feature: Setting and ideal budget (small, medium, high)

Average Level of Education: Bachelor's Degree

Although my sample was small, I'm pretty happy with my completion rate, and excited about the level of enthusiasm for the idea overall. As I move forward, I plan on continuing to work on this app with my new skills.

Thanks for reading!