How might we create a seamless, personalized trip-planning experience that reduces user stress?
Challenge
As a team of UX design students who love to travel, we kept running into the same problem ourselves: flight comparisons, itinerary spreadsheets, and budget tracking scattered across a handful of disconnected apps, with enough friction to make us put off booking trips we had already decided to take. This student project explores what a more thoughtful planning experience could look like.
My Role
I conducted competitive analysis and user interviews, crafted low- and mid-fidelity wireframes, carried out usability testing, and iterated our solution design to refine the experience, working alongside four other UX design students and presenting our work to industry reviewers in under four minutes.
The Solution
TravelersBuddy is a collaborative travel-planning app that auto-organizes saved ideas from social media into curated folders, pulls relevant wishlist items into generated itineraries, and lets users share plans with travel companions, with personalized suggestions keeping the experience organized and tailored to each traveler.
Discover
Refine the problem space, determine research priorities, and prepare a research plan.
Define
Conduct user research, analyze results, and identify the problem.
Design
Ideate and prioritize solutions, create user flows and wireframes, test interactive prototypes with users.
Deliver
Iterate on designs, apply visual polish, present your final output.
Discovery
TripIt, Google Travel, Kayak, and TripAdvisor gave us a view into existing solutions and surfaced three recurring gaps: fragmented experiences, overwhelming information, and a lack of personalization. Read the full competitive analysis ↗
Through 10 interviews, we unearthed critical insights. Travelers wanted:
I love being on vacation, but trip planning? That's a job I'd outsource in a heartbeat!
So, who is Miranda?
Define
We ran a "crazy 8s" exercise, 5-minute intervals of 8 rapid sketches each, to push past the ideas we had been circling since the research phase and get them onto paper.
We transferred those ideas to stickies, then prioritized them into a final feature list.
Design
We identified our key user screens (wishlist, profile, explore) and each sketched at least two options before reconvening to compare approaches.
We combined the strongest parts of each into one direction, guided by what we had learned about our users.
Next, we built lo-fi wireframes into a prototype for user testing, guided by a usability script ↗ and the task we asked participants to complete.
Observing how participants worked through the task surfaced insights I would not have gotten from the script alone.
The brand palette is WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, using vibrant orange for key interaction points like the "Plan Trip" button and a lighter background to keep the rest of the interface calm.
Typography stays clean and legible throughout, so users can move through the planning flow without friction.
Deliver
Curated folders had been our headline feature, but it was not a strong enough differentiator on its own, so I took on finding what would actually set the app apart.
User interviews surfaced a clear pattern: 6 of 10 participants said social media directly influenced their travel decisions, but they struggled to save and revisit ideas they found on Instagram and TikTok. Once liked, a post got lost in the feed and was hard to find again when it came time to plan.
That gap became the opportunity we designed around: a way for users to save, organize, and revisit travel inspiration directly from social media, so nothing gets lost in the feed.
Learnings
Conducting interviews and synthesizing what we heard clarified how much I enjoy understanding people's needs, frustrations, and behaviors. It became the part of the process I looked forward to most.
The crazy 8s exercise showed me I could generate bold, unconventional solutions in just four minutes under real time pressure, which changed how much I trust rapid, low-fidelity ideation.
Being recognized as the strongest presenter by our TA confirmed that I can communicate a design rationale clearly, even under a tight deadline.
Working through the full process, from discovery to final presentation, reinforced my decision to move from software development into UX. It confirmed the direction I am building toward.