JoopiterX
End-to-end design and prototyping for an AI-driven travel mobile app
The opportunity
Abhishek, founder and CEO of JoopiterX was scouting for design talent to build a prototype for a an investor pitch. Stoodio Iterati had just set up shop and me and my partner welcomed the opportunity. We took on the challenge of designing and prototyping the mobile app. It would ultimately be a rich walk-through of the entire AI-assisted travel inspiration, planning and booking journey.
Users & audience
JoopiterX is an AI-based travel app aimed at individuals, couples, family and groups.
Team & role
Hired a lead UX designer, Varsha and a UI prototyper, Anil to work on the project. Led the 2-member team through secondary research, discovery, design and delivered the prototype within a span of 3 months.
Design process & insights
We kicked off the project with a discovery session at a WeWork facility in Bangalore. We collectively clarified our thinking about typical traveller pain-points and their goals while exploring travel options, deciding on destinations, accommodation, food, activities, budgets, etc. The team developed a single persona, Riya, based on 3-4 quick user interviews that Varsha conducted and mapped out the as-is user journey.
Varsha then developed a detailed ideal state user journey map making sense of the various stages of travel planning;
- Inspiration
- Planning
- Booking
- Preparation
- In-trip
Design solution
The team designed their first conversational AI travel app. The AI travel agent design demonstrated the 5 scenario-based conversations between Riya, the traveler and Joop, the AI agent where the entire journey from inspiration to booking could completely be handled by AI. Even before prompting came into common parlance, the team was prototyping appropriate prompts and AI agent responses in helping generate a travel itinerary for Riya.
Not only that, the prototype demonstrated nuanced conversations involving negotiation for better deals with travel vendors that the AI would fetch and get approvals from Riya, triggering pre-travel advisories for Riya to review, addressing In-trip challenges and so on.
Finally, we made sure, review cycles with stakeholders ensured these envisioned experiences were absolutely feasible to be built.
Outcomes & learnings
What started out as a project to deliver a quick POC showing the key benefits of an AI-based travel app, we landed up designing almost 70% of the mobile app experience - the team getting a taste of designing for AI apps. The JoopiterX team were quite thrilled to see what could potentially be a full-fledged design of the entire app itself ready for developing the MVP.