revisit

Team Lead, Front-end developer

For my Human-Computer Interaction class (CS147), we solve the problem of group travel planning through revisit, a social media app for travel that allows people to browse past itineraries and generate their own collaborative group itineraries. We developed the app in React Native and Node.js.

Team 4 Designers 3 Frontend engineers

Duration 10 weeks (Sep - Dec 2024)

website link

Project Context

What is the problem with group travel planning?

There are 3 main steps to group travel planning:
1. Finding the designated trip planner.
2. Finding places to visit.
3. Getting the group to agree on each place.

These are all problems travelers deal with:
1. No one wants to be the group trip planner.
2. You need to visit multiple apps/websites for trip inspiration.
3. People cannot agree on places to visit.

Final Solution

**What is revisit?**

revisit is a travel social media app where you can browse real, community-curated itineraries and create your own itinerary together with friends.

For our quarterly challenge, we were placed into the category of “Design for Movement”. Since the theme of movement is so broad, we used the Crazy 8’s method to brainstorm the first things that come into our mind when we think of movement. We decided on travel because it was a field that interested us and that we found to be inefficient from personal experience.

To gather insights, we targeted a diverse pool of participants, including non-Stanford students, group travelers, and families, conducting 5 in-person interviews with individuals aged 21–45 at locations like brunch spots and hiking stores on University Avenue and on the Stanford campus.

For our first round of needfinding interviews, we interviewed 3 people: Ethan (a civil engineer from Mexico), Lucas (a worker at Keen Footwear from Palo Alto), and Sophia (a Stanford alumni and single mother from Palo Alto). In our interviews, we asked about their background, travel experiences, travel priorities and considerations, level of preparation before traveling, and potential challenges or disagreements when traveling. In this first round of interviews, we were able to establish a structure and roles for interviews and learn how to ask meaningful follow-up questions to guide the interviewee back to the problem space.

(Interview questions we prepared)

The interviews were incredibly insightful because we were able to hear from a wide variety of travelers: Ethan traveled in large groups, Lucas traveled in small groups in over 20+ destinations, and Sophia strictly traveled with her kids. Each interviewee’s travel experiences highlighted a different pain point in traveling, which guided our second round of interviews.

After our first round of interviews, we decided to explore more specific types of travel, talk to more extreme users, and, in general, hear from more travel perspectives. As a result, we interviewed Samantha (a backpacker and solo traveler from Stanford) and Jensen (a tech strategist who enjoys traveling with friends and family). By interviewing a broad range of individuals, we were able to identify common threads between the interviews and key pain points amongst traveling.

With each interview insight, we summarized our findings and created empathy maps for each interviewee.

Problem space

Interviews, Empathy Maps

After creating our empathy maps and analyzing our interviews, we created POV statements for our most thought-provoking interviews, Ethan, Samantha, and Jensen. We created POV statements to better uncover our interview insights and push us into ideation. These three interviewees all came from very different backgrounds, belonged to varying age groups, and traveled for a multitude of reasons.

Problem space

POV Statements

Once the POVs were created, we then brainstormed 12 HMW statements for each interviewee, really pushing ourselves to think outside of the box. HMW statements allowed us to critically reflect on the POV statement and generate ideas on how we can achieve the “game changing” observation. As a team, we read through all the HMWs and voted for our top 3, narrowing down our 12 HMWs to 1 top-voted HMW for each interviewee. We voted on the HMWs that we considered to be thought-provoking and rich in solution generation.

Problem space

HMW Statements

We used the HMW questions we selected and generated solutions for each. Similar to the questions, we voted on the solutions we found to be most innovative and specific to the task at hand.

Problem space

HMW Solutions

To narrow down our final solution “space”, we generated experience prototypes to test each solution we selected. The purpose of doing so was to test our initial assumptions that these solutions do have product market fit. We created a hypothetical product for each solution and tested it on the people below.

Problem space

Experience Prototypes

revisit inspires travelers by adding personalization, community, and consolidation to trip planning. Through revisit, users can collaboratively travel plan, browse peer user-created itineraries, and generate an itinerary tailored to their travel needs.

The rationale for revisit is grounded in the evidence gathered across 2 key experience prototypes: AirShare and TripBytes, as these prototypes shed light on user needs during the trip planning process. In both experience prototypes, our findings revealed that users valued autonomy and flexibility. the AirShare prototype highlights the importance of providing inspiration without dictating a rigid plan. As a result, revisit allows users to browse curated itineraries not as a definitive guide but flexible templates. This empowers users to draw inspiration while maintaining control over their plans, addressing the tension between guidance and freedom. Meanwhile, the TripBytes experience prototype reveals that users appreciate the efficiency of an AI-generated itinerary, but do not like the lack of personalization. As a result, revisit incorporates the ability to personalize and edit itineraries until it perfectly matches their travel needs.

Solution space

The final solution: revisit

Simple: searching for and viewing itineraries
Searching for and viewing itineraries is crucial for our users to overcome the cold start problem. By offering a library of curated and peer-created itineraries, users can quickly gain direction and inspiration, making the daunting task of planning more enjoyable. With each itinerary, users can read comments and feedback on the activities, fostering a strong sense of community.
Moderate: generating a tailored itinerary and sharing with friends
Generating a tailored itinerary and sharing it with friends is a key task that enhances collaboration, personalization, and efficiency in group travel planning. Planning trips with others can often become chaotic, with conflicting ideas and scattered communication across multiple platforms. The ability to generate an itinerary collaboratively fosters clarity and alignment on trip plans.
Complex: editing itinerary to match your needs
Users will be able to add, remove, or modify activities and destinations, which ensures flexibility and personalization. Every traveler has specific interests, priorities, and constraints, so editing an itinerary allows users to tailor the trip to their unique circumstances.

Solution space

revisit’s simple, moderate, and complex tasks

Before we began our wireframe sketching, we created a concept video. This concept video does not portray specifics of how revisit would look like and what medium it would take, but rather focuses on the core of each task. This allowed us to both creatively envision revisit’s purpose beyond an app and also think critically about what we want to provide to the travel space.

We started by creating a storyboard…