Voyagr is a conceptual product created as a personal UX case study to explore how modern travelers can plan, organize, and enjoy trips with less friction. With an increasing number of tools scattered across flights, hotels, itineraries, budgets, and agencies, most travelers experience planning fatigue long before they pack their bags.
This project showcases my end-to-end product thinking—from research and synthesis to IA, UX flows, wireframes, UI design, and testing—while highlighting how design decisions were shaped by real user needs.
Problem Statement
Planning travel today is overwhelming. Through primary research and competitive analysis, I found that travelers face three major challenges:
1. Fragmented Planning Ecosystem
Travelers jump between:
Booking sites
Spreadsheet itineraries
Notes apps
WhatsApp conversations
Budget trackers
Saved screenshots
This fragmentation leads to duplication, confusion, and lost context.
2. Lack of Personalization
Existing apps provide generic suggestions that don’t reflect:
Travel styles
Budgets
Interests
Trip purpose (relaxation vs adventure)
3. Collaboration & Budgeting Are Painful
Users often struggle with:
Tracking expenses
Keeping documents together
Agreeing on options with others
These problems led to a clear opportunity:
Can a single platform simplify the entire trip planning experience while reducing cognitive load and decision stress?
User research is essential for understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations. By employing various research methods, we gain valuable insights into how users interact with products and services.
Quantitative Research
Using quantitative data helped identify major pain points affecting a large user base.
Surveyed 25+ travelers.
Targeted frequent solo travelers, couples, and group travelers.
The survey explored:
Tools used today
Time spent planning trips
Tasks causing the most friction
Desired features
Budgeting habits
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research provided deeper insights into user frustrations and unmet needs.
Conducted 1:1 interviews with 10 travelers (aged 20-30).
Explored user behaviors, frustrations, and expectations through open-ended questions.
Interview themes included:
Ideal planning experience
Emotional triggers (stress, uncertainty)
Preferences around personalization
Collaboration struggles
Painful moments from past trips
These stories helped me understand not only what users do, but how they feel while doing it.
It helped me uncover:
What features people rely on
What they wish existed in travel apps
Which problems are most valuable to solve
Where planning breaks down
72%
Overwhelming Travel Planning
72% of users spend over 6 hours planning each trip.
Why it matters:
Users want simplified decision-making and better organization.
58%
Collaboration & Coordination Are Difficult
58% of travelers struggle to plan trips with others.
Why it matters:
Voyagr must support sharing, syncing, and simplified group decisions.
65%
Lack of Personalization
65% of users feel existing apps provide generic recommendations.
Why it matters:
Personalized suggestions help reduce decision fatigue and improve satisfaction.
80%
Budget Tracking Is Avoided
80% worry about spending but avoid manual tracking.
Why it matters:
Budgeting needs to be passive, integrated, and automatic.
Competitive Analysis
Key Takeaways
None of the major competitors (Google Travel, TripAdvisor, Expedia) offer expense tracking, making Voyagr a unique solution for budget-conscious travelers.
While Google Travel and Wanderlog offer some personalization, Voyagr goes further with AI-driven itinerary recommendations tailored to user preferences.
Unlike competitors, Voyagr ensures users can access trip plans offline, making it a reliable travel companion for areas with limited connectivity.
Google Travel and TripAdvisor excel in review aggregation, but they don’t offer tailored recommendations based on past reviews. Voyagyr integrates reviews while curating recommendations based on individual user preferences.
What does it mean?
The absence of Integrated Expense Tracking in major competitors (TripAdvisor, Expedia), combined with our finding that 80% of users worry about budgeting, defined VOYAGR’s key market differentiator and justified its placement as a primary feature.
Using the insights collected, I reframed the problem into a set of clear, actionable design opportunities. This step ensured the solution remained grounded in user needs rather than assumptions.
Core Problem
Travelers struggle to plan trips because information, decisions, and tasks are scattered across multiple tools, leading to confusion, decision fatigue, and planning delays.
Design Opportunities
1. Reduce the Cognitive Load of Planning
Users need:
a clear pathway from discovery → selection → booking
less switching between tools
better organization of trip components
Opportunity: Introduce a structured, intuitive flow that centralizes all decisions in one place.
2. Make Recommendations Feel Meaningful
Users want:
suggestions based on their tastes
content filtered to match budgets and travel styles
Opportunity: Use personalization to instantly narrow choices.
3. Support Group Planning Without Chaos
Users need:
ways to compare options
shared visibility
simplified decision-making
Opportunity: Build features that make collaboration smooth (future enhancement).
4. Integrate Budgeting Seamlessly
Users want:
spending clarity
simple cost comparison
tools that don’t require manual work
Opportunity: Include budgeting and price transparency throughout the journey.
Outcome of this Step
This reframing guided every design decision—from the IA to the UI—ensuring the product addressed real, high-impact pain points.
Stage
Actions
Pain Points
Emotions
Opportunities
Discover
Scrolls Instagram, Google, Tripadvisor
Too much content, overwhelming
Curious but overwhelmed
Personalized recommendations
Research
Opens 15+ tabs for flights, hotels, blogs
Hard to compare options
Stressed, confused
Unified comparison
Plan
Uses Notes + screenshots + WhatsApp
Information scattered
Frustrated
Centralized itinerary & docs
Book
Moves between apps, re-enters details
No transparency
Uncertain
Integrated booking
Prepare
Saves PDFs, emails, addresses
Easy to lose info
Anxious
Offline access, document storage
Why This Matters?
The journey map revealed two major emotional pain points:
Overwhelm during research
Anxiety before travel
These emotions significantly influenced layout decisions, card designs, and the clarity-first approach in Voyagr.
1. Engaging Onboarding & Visual Style
Decision:
Use full-screen imagery and smooth onboarding sequence.
Why:
Establishes brand feel instantly
Sets emotional tone for a travel app
Increases early engagement
Tradeoff:
High-quality imagery increases load, but optimized assets solved this in later iterations.
2. Personalization in Explore Screen
Decision:
Place personalized recommendations at the top of the Explore screen.
Why:
Users struggled with too many choices and felt overwhelmed. Personalized modules helped reduce decision fatigue.
Tradeoff:
Users who prefer browsing freely might ignore personalized suggestions — but testing showed 80% engagement with these cards.
3. Card-Based Layout Across Flights & Hotels
Decision:
Use card-based patterns for most result listings.
Why:
Easier visual scanning
Clear separation between options
Supports image-based decision-making
Works well for both budget and premium options
Tradeoff:
Cards reduce information density — but clarity mattered more than quantity for this audience.
4. Tabs for Category Switching
Decision:
Use tabs (Explore, Flights, Hotels, Agencies) instead of bottom navigation.
Why:
Users saw these as “content categories” rather than “app-wide actions”
Tabs support quick switching
Improves alignment with mental models from research
Tradeoff:
Bottom navigation could have made the app feel more mobile-native; however, tabs performed better for rapid content switching.
5. Transparent Input Screens (Signup, Login, OTP)
Decision:
Use overlays (semi-transparent) for logins instead of plain backgrounds.
Why:
Keeps visuals immersive
Still accessible with contrast-tested overlays
Tradeoff:
Balancing aesthetics and contrast required careful tuning.
6. Travel Agency Section Structure
Decision:
Separate the Agency List, Agency Details, and Featured Trips.
Why:
Users wanted clarity about who they’re booking from
Trust building happens through transparency + ratings
Tradeoff:
Adds one more tap compared to an all-in-one page, but trust and clarity were more important.
After completing the first high-fidelity prototype, I conducted a lightweight usability test with 6 participants representing my primary user profile: frequent domestic travelers aged 22–35.
Objectives
Evaluate clarity of navigation across the Explore, Flights, Hotels, and Agency tabs.
Validate whether personalized recommendations reduce overwhelm.
Test the transparency and accessibility of semi-transparent onboarding/login screens.
Identify friction points during booking flows.
Outcome
Usability testing helped reinforce many design decisions while revealing subtle clarity enhancements that significantly improved the user flow. These insights directly shaped the next iteration of the UI.
Modern onboarding
The designs of the app has been kept modern maintaining the minimalism and aesthetics.
Two-factor Authorization
Secure login with OTP-based two-factor authentication for verified, protected user access.
Boosted Planning Efficiency
Clearer workflows and integrated trip data significantly reduce planning fragmentation
Improved Personalization
80% of testers preferred Voyagr’s itinerary suggestions over other apps due to its tailored recommendations based on user behavior and preferences.
Enhanced User Satisfaction
Based on post-testing feedback, 9 out of 10 users found the app significantly easier to use compared to existing travel apps
This case study reinforced several key UX/product principles:
User research reveals mental models, not just pain points.
Travelers don’t only want options — they want clarity and reassurance.Personalization is only effective if it’s predictable.
Users trusted suggestions more when the logic felt explainable.Visual delight must always support function.
High-quality photos enriched the brand but required careful contrast tuning.Complex domains need clear hierarchy above all else.
Travel information is dense; clarity beats creativity every time.
Voyagr began as a conceptual UX exploration and matured into a cohesive, research-driven travel platform centered around reducing overwhelm. Through research, synthesis, structured flows, and careful iteration, I designed a solution that makes trip planning simpler, clearer, and more personalized — giving travelers more time to enjoy the journey instead of wrestling with logistics.