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Based from a traditional travel agency background, STRING was seeking to create a modern solution for travel inspiration and planning. They approached us with a strong concept in mind and series of features that they envisioned in their app.
Working with an entirely new concept, we had to start work on the app design concurrently while branding work was still in progress. We came up with few options of art direction in order to tie down the initial styling and UI elements.
Through design research and design iterations with various stakeholder meetings, we narrowed down user flows and organised content in familiar ways similar to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest to ease users into navigating the app. These resulted in a consolidated social feed with 3 types of posts – itineraries, places and user posts.
Seeking to replace travel planning usually done using from excel sheets, we had to strike a balance between creating complex itinerary building functionalities versus engaging users with straightforward listings that catered for continuous discoveries and flexible curation of travel plans. Initial sketches of itineraries displayed timelines, creating storytelling narratives while the final itinerary page consolidates content into sectioned content that are easy to navigate.
As a first iteration, it was essential to keep things real and straightforward so that users could easily onboard the app. The last step involved simplification of the entire app design, including removing features such as advance search pages and various gamification of the app.