A travel companion that learns and evolves with every user interaction.
As part of my capstone project, I'm developing ItinerAI, an app that aims to streamline the travel planning process by bridging the gap between inspiration and execution. This case study outlines my approach to designing a more intuitive and personalized travel companion. While the project is still a work in progress, it showcases key features and design decisions made so far.
ItinerAI is a travel planning tool that assists people in discovering destinations and creating personalized itineraries. It learns from peoples' natural behaviors and preferences to make travel planning more enjoyable and efficient by offering tailored recommendations.
Addressing how travelers often lose track of interesting places or activities they come across online, I designed a quick sharing feature. This allows people to save travel content directly to ItinerAI from various apps and websites.
For example, when a people see an appealing Instagram post about a destination, they can share it to ItinerAI with just a couple of taps, saving the inspiration without interrupting their browsing.
The primary objective of this feature is to understand and learn the user's travel preferences and tastes effectively. By doing so, ItinerAI can provide more personalized and relevant travel suggestions.
People are heavily influenced by visual content on social media platforms when choosing travel destinations. Instagram posts, YouTube videos, and photos shared by friends often spark the initial desire to visit a place.
People already have an intuitive way of capturing travel inspiration through their interactions with social media. They save posts, create collections, and share content related to places they want to visit.
Based on these observations, I explored several in-app solutions to replicate this natural behavior:
A content feed within ItinerAI that learns from user engagement. This approach mimics popular social media platforms, presenting users with a continuous stream of travel-related content. As users interact with posts, the app builds a profile of their preferences.
Natural engagement; effortless recommendations
Aligns with current travel inspiration gathering habits
Challenging to build a viable social network
Requires significant content generation to be useful
Users swipe on curated sets of destinations and activities. This interface presents users with a series of travel options, allowing them to quickly indicate their preferences through familiar swipe gestures. It aims to gather direct input on user tastes efficiently.
Familiar, easy interaction; direct preference input
Efficient coverage of diverse tastes with well-curated sets
Limited to predefined options; lacks natural exploration
Not suitable for frequent use
Note: While not ideal for initial taste learning, this could be a great feedback mechanism post trip.
A visual, conversational interface for travel exploration and itinerary creation. This tool combines AI-driven research capabilities with a user-friendly interface, allowing users to explore destinations, ask questions, and create itineraries. The system learns from these interactions to understand user preferences.
Supports natural curiosity and exploration
Learns from user queries and interactions
Focuses more on planning than understanding tastes
Requires active user engagement
After exploring these options, I realized that instead of trying to replicate social media within the app, a more effective approach would be to integrate with the platforms users already use.
Initially conceived as sharing to ItinerAI's Instagram account, this idea evolved into direct sharing from various social media platforms to ItinerAI. This approach leverages users' existing habits of saving and sharing travel inspiration across different platforms.
Leverages users' preferred medium
Enables sharing from multiple sources
Integrates with existing user behaviors
Privacy concerns
After careful consideration, the evolved social media integration (direct sharing to ItinerAI) emerged as the most promising solution. It captures authentic user interests, leverages existing behaviors across multiple platforms, and avoids the complexities of building a new social network or relying on a single third-party platform.
As a result of this implementation, people naturally build an organized library of their travel inspirations within ItinerAI.
The Bucket List feature automatically organizes saved content by destinations, activities and platforms. People can easily revisit and explore their travel inspirations in one place.
For example, when a people wants to plan a trip, they can open their Bucket List and see all their saved ideas neatly categorized by location, helping them rediscover and utilize their travel inspirations.
Transform scattered ideas into cohesive travel plans, considering personal preferences, budget, and time constraints.
Generic travel recommendations often fail to account for individual needs and preferences. To solve this, I created a comprehensive user profile system.
The profile captures crucial details like dietary restrictions, accessibility needs, and travel document information. This allows ItinerAI to provide tailored suggestions and alert users to potential travel requirements well in advance.
Receive personalized suggestions for destinations, activities, and accommodations based on your evolving travel tastes and situations.
These core experiences work together to create a travel planning process that feels natural, efficient, and tailored to each user's unique preferences and style.
Work in Progress...