Collaborative Trip Planner

Summary

Our goal at Travis was to make it fun and easy for travelers to plan trips with friends in one place. This led to the design and launch of Moodboards - a visual trip planner allowing real-time collaboration of up to 10 users.

My role

User analytics & research: Initially, the platform was home to thousands of visual travel stories (in a blog-like format), where users could save recommended places to a list. However, average places saved and user retention was lower than expected. I worked with our team to conduct an online survey and user research - we found out that users lacked the functionality they needed to actually plan trips from the saved places. They also wanted an easy way to share the trip plans with their travel buddies. This led us to a prioritized list of features - map view, custom tags, notes, and the biggest of all, collaboration.

Product management: With limited design and engineering resources, the challenge for us was to identify the core user need that would allow users to return to use Travis Moodboards as a core tool in their trip planning process, deliver that well first, before expanding the feature set. We also needed to research and test new collaboration technology, as well as location databases, that we had not worked with before. I worked with the team to prioritize features based on user feedback and business objectives, and managed the ongoing prioritization of the roadmap, through build, launch and ongoing iteration of the product.

Outcomes

Acquired 100,000+ users in 12 months

Average places saved per user increased 220%