Group travel is meant to be enjoyable. But juggling betw plans, decisions, and expenses across multiple people often creates friction. Travelers rely on a fragmented ecosystem of tools: messaging apps, maps, spreadsheets, and payment apps, none of which are designed to work together.
This fragmentation leads to misalignment, duplicated effort, and unnecessary stress, especially for the person who takes on the organizer role. There is a clear opportunity for a single, shared space that supports planning, collaboration, and financial transparency throughout the trip lifecycle.
Today, group travel planning is scattered across too many tools. Organizers must constantly switch between apps to plan itineraries, coordinate decisions, track expenses, and settle payments.
This creates:
As a result, what should be a shared experience often becomes stressful and unbalanced.
How might we help group travel organizers coordinate plans, decisions, and expenses in a way that feels simple, transparent, and socially comfortable for everyone involved?
Group travel is both a logistical and social experience, where coordination, decision-making, and money management can easily create friction between people. The project therefore followed a user-centered and iterative approach, involving users from early exploration to final validation to ensure interactions felt natural, inclusive, and socially comfortable.
Rather than optimizing isolated features, the approach focused on shared workflows and group dynamics, designing interactions that reduce back-and-forth, make responsibilities visible, and support participation without pressure. Design decisions were refined through iterative prototyping and user feedback, with the goal of preserving trust and positive group dynamics throughout the trip.
I began by creating user profiles/personas to understand group roles, behaviors, and expectations. These profiles guided early assumptions and were validated through discussions with potential users.
Based on these insights, I designed user flows and wireframes to structure the experience around collaboration rather than individual tasks. Early testing helped identify friction points and refine flows before investing in high-fidelity design.
Prototypes were tested regularly with users to evaluate clarity, ease of collaboration, and comfort around money-related interactions. The final design (presented in the Outcomes section) integrates this feedback, resulting in an experience shaped by real usage rather than assumptions.
All trip-related information lives in one place, reducing confusion and repetitive communication.
Polls and shared views enable asynchronous decision-making without endless messaging.
Clear expense tracking and balances prevent misunderstandings and awkward conversations.
Responsibility is shared visually, reducing the emotional and cognitive burden on one person.
By making plans, decisions, and financial responsibilities visible to everyone, TripUp enables each participant to feel informed and empowered to contribute.
Shared visibility enables participation: users feel in control when they can engage on their own terms.
This project highlighted how group travel is fundamentally a social experience, not just a coordination problem. During testing, users consistently expressed a desire to interact not only within their travel group, but also beyond it: discovering where friends have been, sharing experiences, or connecting trips across time.
I learned that social features create value when they feel ambient and optional, rather than intrusive. Users want awareness and connection without obligation. Designing for this meant focusing on visibility, context, and lightweight interactions instead of constant prompts or notifications.
User feedback showed that conversational AI is most valuable when it acts as a non-intrusive companion rather than a decision-maker. In TripUp, users were excited to chat with an AI to explore Lisbon because it allowed curiosity and discovery without interrupting group dynamics or requiring consensus.
