Jaunt.com

We continued to refine our ideas and conceptualize features for our solutions. As suggested by our user research, our target users value their constraints for planning a trip. Thus we decided to incorporate in our design, a feature that makes tour recommendations within budget and time constraints.

The importance of word of mouth inspired us to use photos and comments from friends and family members who have already visited the place as a source of information. This aspect of leveraging others' experiences, we felt could be extended beyond trip planning to real time use where a user could find out from our system who among her friends/family had visited the place that she was in and call them up to ask any question about the place.

We decided that flexibility in planning and the ability to make real time changes is important to our target group and hence our design should not make them adhere to a rigid plan. This led us to conceptualize a visual trip planning tool that allows modifications by dragging and dropping places to visit. Our system aids the process by recommending places to visit on the way, routes to take to a place etc.

As it emerged from our user research that trips are planned "around" certain must visit landmarks, we designed our tool in such a way that users could specify the places they must visit and it generates alternative trips for them to choose from, with different intermediate travel routes, but covering all the places that they have entered.

Finally, a key feature in our design is the ability to create group and personal albums out of the travel photos and share them with others, which in turn could be used by other users to plan their trips.