Case study: The most happening global travel community ✈️
🚙Background
Before we start off, let me share with you a personal anecdote that made me realize how important communities are for travel. In January 2021 I went on my first ever solo trip to spend the new year at Gokarna, Karnataka, India. I stayed at two backpacker hostels there — Zostel and Trippr.
One of those days, a few fellow travelers at Zostel suggested me to visit Bhagvan café — a beach facing café — because they make amazing food. So I set foot all alone to check if this café is really worth all the hype. It was in a desolate location. The long, tiring walk to the café was eerily creepy because all I could hear was the sound of the waves, no human around, no lights of any sort. I was almost about to give up when I finally found it. It was the shadiest place I had ever been to. It looked something like this:
With its dim lighting and interiors, it gave me a scary vibe. It’s some place I’d not have stepped into had my friends not suggested. But, once I was inside, the hospitality of the staff and the food was heavenly. I felt out of the world. It’s an experience I’ll cherish for a lifetime.
And yes! That’s when I realized that damn! Communities play a major role in making your travel experiences much better. But not everyone has access to individually meeting people and talking to them beforehand.
So what do we do? Move communities online? Does that really work because travel is something that happens in the physical realm? With all these questions in mind, along with my teammates who are equally enthusiastic about travelling, we chose travel as our niche for this research assignment given by 10kdesigners.
👩🔧Task
Our task was to prepare a research report on an Internet community and understand how people spend time in these communities, their behavior, usage patterns and gather findings that can be distilled into insights.
Deliverables: Customer journey maps depicting tasks performed by the different user groups identified. Once we have some findings and can start seeing patterns, we want to give ideas and suggestions to improve the overall experience.
👯♀️Team members
Initially, before choosing our community for research, we spoke to a few friends who are travel enthusiasts to know what travel communities they are aware/ part of. Surprisingly, this is what we noticed:
Having seen that most of our friends were not familiar with online communities, we decided that we’ll focus on two user groups:
- one, that is already part of a travel community and
- two, the ones that aren’t. Subsequently, we outlined the goals of our research project.
🎯Goals
- To understand and explain online travel communities. Particularly, deep dive into one of the most popular online communities — The Tripoto Community.
- To learn how existing users are utilizing the platform and highlight in how many different ways they are currently using it.
- To address why few travelers do not use any travel based apps or are not part of online travel communities.
- Proving or disproving generalized assumptions.
💭Hypothesis and Assumptions
When we started off, we had a few presumptions about online travel communities and Tripoto. We did not want them to lead us, but at the same time wanted to validate them with research. So we made a list of all these assumptions before beginning the research:
- Travel enthusiasts are familiar with travel communities
- Travel enthusiasts trust travel communities
- Travel enthusiasts prefer word of mouth over online surfing
- Tripoto users get paid via money
- Tripoto users are super active on the Tripoto app on day to day basis
- Tripoto users are creating content only out of passion
- All Tripoto users collaborate on the app itself
- Tripoto has no checks about the credibility of content posted
- Tripoto community has only two user groups: content creators and content consumers
- Tripoto community is popular on website + Instagram
- Tripoto stand alone app does not have many users, thereby the content reach is far less
🧐Secondary research
First and foremost, we wanted to develop a proper understanding of online communities given that there was some confusion about this among the people we interacted with.
These are a few definitions that helped us understand the concept of communities better:
“It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community.” — Bill Bishop
At its root, an online community or internet community is a group of people with a shared interest or purpose who use the internet to communicate with each other. Online communities have their own set of guidelines and needs, like online community engagement, moderation and management. Source
Main insights from Secondary research:
⚖️Comparative Analysis
Now that we gained a basic understanding of how online communities function, what have been the trends and how the travel industry is coping up with the pandemic, we set out to understand more about online travel communities and explored a few. Here is a comparative view of the various communities that we explored:
Most observed features: Messaging and Instagram page
Least observed features: Travel groups, travel guides, blogs, packages and bookings, rewards, workshops & tutorials
❓Why Tripoto?
Out of all the communities explored, we decided to dive deep into the Tripoto community for the following reasons:
- While researching, we realized the users of the community share amazing stories and itineraries to its minute details which drew our attention. The community also has features such as receiving badges, getting paid to travel, forum to ask questions etc., which showed how collaborative it is.
- The number of users using the Tripoto community is large. An interesting part was to see the number is high not only on Instagram or the app but also on Youtube, Facebook etc. So, this caught our attention to explore more on Tripoto community.
- Tripoto had a majority of features that were least observed in the other communities that we explored.
🛒Playstore reviews for Tripoto:
🎙️Primary research
1️⃣ User group 1: Tripoto community members
For the first user group, we sent requests to people on the Tripoto app and looked for tagged users on Tripoto’s Instagram page as well. We reached out close to a 100 people, and managed to get insights from around 20 of them.
While reaching out to them, I ensured to make them feel comfortable and connected rather than directly jumping to questions:
We interviewed a few users of the app and also sent out a survey to a few others. Through the responses received, we developed a basic understanding of how the Tripoto app works:
Tripoto community is a unified platform that brings together avid travelers and their journeys in the most amazing way to people within and outside the community. Below is a sneak peek of the same:
💁🏻♀️Qualitative insights:
- The Tripoto community in general is very welcoming and motivating which gives a boost to budding travellers.
- The financial model of Tripoto acts as an incentive for travel content creators. It gives them a satisfaction of getting a return on all their efforts.
- The huge user and follower base that Tripoto has managed to grow, creates a sense of trust among users. However, a few of them still fear the relevance and genuineness of travel communities with the emergence of social media.
- Users find the Tripoto app quite user friendly and easy to navigate. It’s quite feature rich and sets itself apart by bringing various dimensions of travel under one umbrella.
- As the content here is posted by real travelers, it’s reliable and also an exhaustive source of information, especially for new travellers and offbeat locations.
🔢Quantitative insights:
2️⃣ User group 2 : The general travel enthusiasts
💁🏻♀️Qualitative insights:
- Majority of the travel enthusiasts love traveling both solo and in groups as they feel that on a solo trip, they have the liberty to explore places at their own pace as per their time schedule, and in group travels they get to spend quality time with their friends/family and bond with them.
- Most travelers plan their trips by surfing the net, going through a few travel blogs for finding places to explore, making note of places visited by their friends, checking their budget, and finding accommodation. Some of them get all their travel-related information by contacting the locals.
- Some of the blockers that travelers usually face are lack of enough information on the internet regarding unpopular places, friends dropping off, and not having any travel partner, uncertainty around the weather, availability of accommodation and basic facilities.
- Few of the other blockers that they face are unavailabilty of food, sanitation facilities, network coverage, language barriers and mismatch between the map locations.
🔢Quantitative insights
☹️Pain points:
👤User Personas:
As we progressed in our research, based on the information collected, we found a few categories of people clearly taking shape. So, to ensure that all the teammates are on the same page, we created personas for a shared context and to be aware of who we are focusing on.
User Group 1 — Tripoto users
User Group 2 — General travel enthusiasts
📈User Journey Maps
Persona: Jay
Scenario: Jay has just returned from a scenic trip to Himachal Pradesh and wants to share his beautiful experience in the heavenly mountains on the Tripoto app. The following map shows his journey through this process:
Persona: Siddhant
Scenario: Sid has just discovered the Tripoto community through their Instagram page, goes through their profile, discovers that they have an app and decides to explore it. The following map covers his journey from discovery to exploration.
Persona: Aisha
Scenario: Aisha decides to take a much needed break and goes on an adventurous trip to the mountains. The following map covers her entire journey right from when she takes the decision of travelling, till she completes her trip.
✅Hypothesis Validation
🤯Ideas and suggestions for improvement
☹️ Spam on the community forum and messaging feature
💡 Connection Request: Allow the user to add a note along with the connection request, also show the mutual friends when a traveller receives a request. Introduce a feature where users can join specific travel groups, collaborate and find travel partners.
💡 Credibility: Allow users to upvote and save answers they like in the community forum. Display answers with highest upvotes/saves or the ones from verified accounts on top. Give credits only top 5 of these.
☹️ Content Creation Related
💡 Time consuming to create content: While a user is posting content, make an ‘Ask for help’ feature available along with a troubleshooting manual. Give an option to share the draft with others in order to get feedback before posting it on the app.
💡 Lack of content templates: Provide templates and structure for different types of content like photoblogs & trip, to assist the users in content creation. To help understand what the readers prefer, provide insights for the content created previously.
💡 Plagiarism checks: Once posted, if the content doesn’t pass plagiarism check, then support plagiarism claims with suitable reasons and references along with suggestions about what to do next. Enhance Tripoto.ai to give quick responses and help connect with the team.
☹️ Timely Support
💡 Constant travel support: To assist the user during travel, allow uploading of custom route maps for places that are unpopular, hard to locate or have limited network connectivity. Detect the live location of the user on seeking permission and send a push notification on the app before the user goes into a bad connectivity zone or a place with very limited transport, food and sanitation facilities.
💡 Create Travel Guides: Make travel guides exhaustive with all the info about packing essentials, dos and don’ts, people they can reach out to for info about this place, etc. with specific filters right in the beginning of the guide. Include a list of FAQs and popular questions asked while traveling to unpopular locations in the local language along with English/native language translation.
💡 Inadequate user profile update: Add the following information in the users’ profiles: verification badge and local guide tag for authenticity; location details if preferred and availability status like ‘busy’, ‘currently traveling’ etc.
☹️ Feature Related
💡 Credits: Allow the users to go through a few features of the app without signing up but reserve specific features like posting, using the forum, wishlisting etc. for post sign up. Credits can be given for signing up.
💡 Feature Familiarization: Include an onboarding flow where users are familiarized with the various features available on the app. Include some of the most important features like ‘Ask the community’, ‘Travel guides’, ‘Get paid to travel’ etc. here. Also, tweak the IA of the app to make these features more discoverable. Move the Tinder-like explore now feature to onboarding so that the user can choose who to follow. Instead of just profile pictures, show snippets of the creator’s content.
💡 Calendar Sync: To help with travel planning, introduce sync with calendar for figuring out holidays and long weekends — suggest trips based on this; a bucket list feature; itinerary creator with notes. Highlight verified travel options.
💡 Post Notifications: Alter the post notifications to include the title of the post or something regarding the post to catch the attention of the user. Segregate the message and connection notifications. Similarly segregate post and activity notifications.
📝Learnings and Takeaways
- 🔍 The importance of understanding the problem statement clearly before jumping into solutions: When we started off with the assignment, we slightly went off track. We started researching about various communities and exploring before clearly comprehending the given task. Once we corrected ourselves, we felt much better and had a sense of direction.
- 😇 The sheer joy of working in a team: I was initially skeptical about doing a team assignment because I had the fear of ‘What if things don’t go my way?’ ‘What if the work does not get divided equally?’ ‘What if my teammates take all the credit?’ etc. But I was proved wrong as we advanced through the process. Having fellow designers to collaborate with, to receive different perspectives from was one of my main driving forces throughout the project.
- 🙏🏻 Massive respect for UX Researchers: I’ll not lie. As this was the first time we were doing an in-depth research project, it did get tiring at some points — especially during the primary research phase — mainly because most of our progress was dependent on the response time of the people we reached out to. Considering the fact that they were travelers, there was an added latency. Despite all this, we still kept going, with passion. So our respect for researchers who do this day in and day out increased multifold.
- 🔄The iterative nature of research: Throughout our project, there were instances where we found some gaps that needed another round of reaching out to our research participants. We had our share of moments when we felt like we could have done things way better. I learnt that research is not ticking of a box in the checklist, but it is a continuous process of getting more familiar with users, their goals, needs and pain points.
- 🥳I made 2 new friends!
