Group travelling made fun to organize!

This case study is all about making an experience better for group of travelers using MakeMyTrip app/site. Currently the app/site allows people to check out the places, transportation, experiences etc. individually. When a group of people are travelling, a lot of communication has to happen back and forth between the person taking in charge of bookings and rest of the groups. So as a part of Virtual Design Hackathon conducted by GrowthSchool, we, a group of 5 people, had to come up with a feature for MakeMyTrip app/site to make the planning of a trip easy for group of travelers.

Design a feature for MakeMyTrip, allowing a group of friends to plan and book their mutual vacation.

The Hackathon was a very different and fun experience. It gave us the experience of working on the edge, putting in all our efforts and show a good team work. The whole team full of strangers and was spread across the country and everyone was working remotely. The rules for the hackathon were as follows —

• Choose a topic out of 5 given topics
• Within next 48 hours, solve the problem and come up with prototypes for the same. Plan on how we gonna achieve it on our own, no hard and fast rules on our approach of solving the problem
• The tasks done by the group members should be clear and should be presented as YouTube video

Our team was named as G-15, and once the topics were announced, we started discussing them over Airmeet, a virtual events platform which gives out some really good options to conduct events online. With all the discussions we concluded to work on the MakeMyTrip problem statement

Day 1 — Kickstart of the Hackathon

We started with the whole roadmap planning, planned how everyone’s gonna work for next 48 hours. Here’s a small glimpse of our timetable

Once the planning was done, we all started with secondary/desk research and started gathering the data related to MakeMyTrip and other available apps which have same business as MakeMyTrip. We found out many interesting apps that already exists in market which provides a platform for entire group to plan together for a trip.

Some stats which we found out —

These stats show hows the traffic to MakeMyTrip app

Some similar apps that already exists in market.

Prava Link: http://pravaapp.com/

Links:

https://www.makemytrip.com/blog/digital-india-impact-on-travel-trends

https://www.makemytrip.com/blog/tamil/node/21852

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/04/19/travel-marketing-tips

https://www.livemint.com/Consumer/1oPnkPjZgoHFAhH7lqqPOK/How-many-Indians-travel.html

https://www.makemytrip.com/offsites/group_tours_landing.html

https://medium.com/makemytrip-engineering/data-insights-engine-makemytrip-900bd353d99c

https://mybiz.makemytrip.com/corp/bulkBooking#howItWorksSection

We also had some data from our research made for Airbnb app. we planned to consider some of its data and some of its users as well

We started with our primary research individually, then collaborated and discussed data that we gathered. This individually gathering data helped us to get the data from different perspectives. Once we started discussing, we found out most common issues with the and started making our assumptions based on this data, at this point we had a lot of assumptions based on our research and personal experiences, but we needed some validations to make sure of these assumptions. That’s why we planned to do Primary research to validate these assumptions. But before starting out our primary research we had one more task on our plate that needed to be done on priority i.e. First round of presentation to the judges.

We first reviewed the presentation prepared by one of the team member Rayna for first round of presentation where we had to talk about which topic we chose and why that particular topic.

Once the presentation was reviewed, we sat and decided the questions for roll out forms to get the users to interview. We created a google form and rolled it out across social media platforms.

Survey form link — https://forms.gle/zYkLcrBT2v9J1PMVA

Once the survey form was rolled out, the group was again divided into two. One group consisted of me and one more member Harsha who worked conducting interviews and getting the data from users and the other group consisting of Rayna, Dhaval and Sasi worked on User Journey mapping.

Here a interview snippets —

User Journey flow done by Rayna and Dhaval

Once these tasks were completed, the whole team collaborated and was validate the assumptions made initially and thus started with our Ideation stage

Ideation -

Everyone got on the call, and started discussing the ideas. When we agreed on one idea, we started considering them as a feature and this loop kept on happening and we ended up with 2 new features for MakeMyTrip

Plan my trip — This was the first feature that we came up with which included a new option where in the users can go ahead and start creating their own groups and plan rest of things using in MakeMytrip app itself. It gives a option to the users to vote for the places/accommodation etc. so that the whole group can decide everything in one common place and don’t have to jump between multiple apps creating a chaos.

Explore on the go — This is the 2nd feature which will allow users to either create a custom itinerary or the app itself will create one for them based on their previous choices.

Now that we have something in our minds/idea boards, it was time to put these thoughts in to visuals, thus we started with Wireframing.

Initially we all took it up without splitting the features, then we realized it was going too slow. We again collaborated and started splitting the feature based on the pages.

Here are the wireframes that I created, the first one is for Plan my trip feature

Wireframes link — https://whimsical.com/mmt-A6jEW9C9rkJ2Ps24hCDBYH

Once these wireframes were completed, Dhaval spent time on checking the basic necessities to start the prototyping i.e. the standards/guidelines that the app MakeMyTrip is using so that the new feature are consistent and fit in the app. The standard colors, fonts, backgrounds etc. were analyzed before starting the High Fidelity prototyping.

The prototyping task was taken up by Rayna, Dhaval and Harsha. They came up with the following prototype

Feature 1 — The Plan Ahead

The final name for plan my trip is a feature that allows users to create a group with their fellow travelers.

• It provides a option to chat with all the group members so that they don’t have to rely on other apps to have a discussion and send all the MakeMyTirp links to different apps so that others should go there again, have a look at it and tell their opinion about it.
• It also allows the users to choose the activities, places etc. they want to do as part of their trip. Later based on everybody’s selection people can go ahead and vote for it.
• Once everyone votes, the admin will be able to finalize the trip and send the details to everyone in the same app.
• Also the group expenses can be tracked in the same place under Expense track button. The expenses page will show how much everyone has spent, who owes how much money to whom.

Feature 2 — “Explore on the Go”

Once the details in the 2nd screen are filled, it will take to the same common pages that was created as part of feature 1. It will allow the users to plan their activities throughout the trip and gives a itinerary.

Once the prototypes were ready, a document was created and a video was made for the same and finally submitted to the judges to review.

The whole experience was of working on a project with all new people staying in different location was something new and fun. I hope you guys enjoyed reading the case study

Thank you! :)