Sienna Mosher PrePosal Excurvant

Excurvant UX/UI

Background

Excruvant is an established company focussed on creating the “best online social travel community”.  Several start ups have attempted such a platform, but have not been successful.  Excruvant dreams to combine discovery, booking, and sharing to defragment the travel industry.  With a beta web platform up and running they are well on their way to completing their goal, but wish to improve upon the user experience.  The objective is then to create an amazing, personalized interface so that users are both rationally and emotionally satisfied with this application.

Executive Summary

To accomplish this objective the interface must be easy and enjoyable to use and integrating the discovery process, the overhead of booking a trip, and helping the user share.  With a focus on personalized experience, the app needs to get to know the user.  This could be done by asking the user about travel preferences.  Off of this information, we can tailor a custom trip discovery experience that finds not only the best trips, but the best trips for them.  The information regarding each possible trip could include pictures, reviews, age ranges, activities- Anything that can be presented in a concise and organized fashion to help seduce the user.  Then we can seamlessly help them complete the overhead for the trip- booking.  Booking a trip is always a hassle.  But luckily there are several software solutions out there that already solve this issue- We only need to integrate them into our system.  Since we already know some background information about them, we can pre-select a few custom bookings.  To make this experience special we could also suggest travel dates for them based on when it is best to visit the location, with an eye for weather, price, and events.  Next, we need to help them share this trip.  Since this platform isn’t the first form of social media, we need to connect it with existing social media.  This way friends and family can still see your adventures!  An added bonus is exposure to these friends and family that aren’t yet connected with Excurvant’s platform.  Sharing a trip means sharing your interest in certain trips to entice friends to join, sharing when you’ve booked and committed to a trip, and sharing the results.  The goal is to connect all of these together in an aesthetically pleasing way to give the user an enjoyable experience that makes traveling easy, social, and smart.  

Viability Analysis

The integration process with social media and booking may be challenging, but I am sure the majority of these sites have back doors for integration purposes.  The other difficult piece will be the customization- remembering the user preferences, building on them, and connecting them to experiences of others with similar preferences.  

Risks and Rewards

The main reward of this project would be to be the first successful social travel application.  A byproduct of this reward is providing a pleasurable and connected experience for users.  There are some risks in tying into developed social media, including possible legal issues that might occur when using their api.  With the booking, we will need to manage a secure connection into the 3rd party booking for users to make purchases.

Closing

Travelers need this app.  Customized discovery, booking, and sharing makes this proposal unique and desirable.  Integrating with existing social media makes the user comfortable and allows sharing to occur.  Integrating the booking means they never have to leave our site when they are planning and executing a trip!  By investing time and resources into this process, Excurvant can come out on top!

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