The User Journey of InstaPlan is definitely something that I struggled with the most. The first prototype was way too complicated in terms of the user flow. But before I talk about the changes I made, let’s first discuss the user journey of our everyday scrolling on Instagram, seeing all these interesting places in a certain city, deciding to go there, to starting to plan such a trip:
With the boom of social media, we learn about different parts of the world without intentionally doing our own research, which affects how we decide where to travel.
If you keep seeing all these beautiful pictures of Bali from your friends or travel bloggers on Instagram, chances are you may want to visit Bali one day as well. And this is essentially how stage I leads a user to stage II: social media induces us to do research about a certain place.
Indeed, whether you’ll actually book a vacation may ultimately depend on time and money. But here’s the key: By the time you’ve made a decision to visit a place, you are already exposed to that place to some extents. If you decide to go to New York, chances are you’ve already liked or even saved some posts tagged at locations in New York where you want to check out. You’ve done part of the “research” from your everyday scrolling without even knowing it.
“Okay great! I’ll just retrieve what I like about New York at my friend’s Instagram or that NY blogger’s account. I’ll just go through my saved posts…” you may think.
But doing research on Instagram is actually much harder than it sounds, as demonstrated by stage IV. It’s exhausting to say the least. Useful posts are often time buried in a sea of posts. Yet, to a certain extent, this is redundant. It exists because we tend to forget what we liked/saved (what we did in stage I). Even if we do remember, they are scattered on different places.
You’ll have to decide whether a post is relevant one by one. Among all these saved posts, liked posts, or posts from a blogger, you need to first identify whether a post is tagged in New York, which is exhausting enough. Then you need to decide whether you actually want to visit place. Simply put, stage IV is particular painful because the relevant information got mixed up with the irrelevant one.
And this problem is exactly what InstaPlan intends to solve: to get rid of the pain points in stage IV and streamline this process:
And there’s currently no easier way to sort them out. But InstaPlan does just that. It presents you all the posts that are:
- tagged with a location in the destination; AND
- previously liked or saved.
Say you want to go to Vancouver. All you need to do is telling InstaPlan that you’re going to Vancouver, then it will fetch all the liked and saved posts tagged in Vancouver:
This saves you from having to go through your likes or saved posts. Then you can select the posts that you’re actually interested in. What’s more, after selecting the interesting places, InstaPlan presents them on a map so that you know the distance between them and allows you to create an itinerary:
These are the essential interfaces of InstaPlan. Now InstaPlan doesn’t always look like this. The above interfaces are from the latest prototype. I’ve made some drastic changes to both the user flow and the interfaces after some user testing, which I will talk about soon. In any case, here’s the user flow of InstaPlan (the latest one):
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