MIT sandbox | UIUX | B2C | Mobile

Fliptrip

Trip Itinerary Planner

Overview

Helping Travelers Visualize and Plan Seamless Itineraries

At-A-Glance

FlipTrip is a travel itinerary planner that helps users visualize their schedules, explore destinations, and manage budgets—individually or collaboratively. Designed to reduce friction in group travel planning, the tool integrates time, location, and cost into one visualized experience.
Winner of MIT Sandbox Innovation Grant (2019–2020)

My contribution

1.

Customer Insights & Ideation: Uncovering & translating valuable insights into actionable features that align with customer behaviors and motivations.

2.

Experience Strategy & Vision: Created frameworks, prototypes, and communicated a clear vision to align stakeholders, facilitating decision-making processes.

3.

Planning & Scope Definition: Balanced customer goals with business objectives, prioritized features for successful launches and future iterations with PM

4.

Design Execution & Validation: Developed design handovers, and build and maintain design system.

My Role

User Research
Design + Prototype
Branding

Team

PM x2
Designer x2
Eng x5

Timeline

Jan - Dec, 2021

Tool

Usertesting
Figma, ProtoPie
Adobe Creative cloud

Problem

Self-planned travel is harder than it should be

The rise of self-guided travel post-COVID has empowered users to explore and plan on their own.
However, the process remains fragmented and overwhelming due to:

Unclear destinations: Travel posts inspire, but rarely tell users where to go.

Too much manual work: Planning requires jumping across tabs and tools.

Group misalignment: Hard to coordinate time, budget, and preferences.

As a result

“I spent more time planning the trip than actually enjoying it.”

“Googling everything from scratch is exhausting—I wish there was a smarter way.”

HMW & strategy

How Might We Make Planning as Enjoyable as Traveling?

Key strategy

Create a travel ecosystem

Consolidate useful content directly in-app to reduce external searching.

Visualize itineraries

Turn scattered plans into clear, actionable timelines with smart suggestions.

Lower the barrier to content creation

Allow users to easily log and share tips, routes, and experiences.

Support shared planning

Co-editing, allowing group travelers to share trip schedules and notes

The solution

Fliptrip: visualizing your itinerary!

Share your trip with ease

Discover

This is the page for discovery, providing the latest and hottest travel contents.

Plan your trip

My trips and profile

This page for managing trips. Allow users to track current trips, create new trips and review past trips. Plan with your friends, travel with your friends

Search enhancement & text recognition

When searching on FlipTrip, we help you target places, hotels, flights, activities, restaurants with smart filter
When posting travel notes, we use text recognition to help you complete your content with minimum effort.

Research & define

Understanding Travel Planning Through Real Behavior

Before jumping into design, I conducted user interviews, competitive analysis, and surveys to understand how people plan their trips—especially in a post-pandemic context.

What Does “Planning” Really Mean?

We surveyed travelers on WeChat and Facebook during peak holidays to capture real planning behaviors. Instead of just relying on interviews, we observed users' actual planning flows, then spoke with them after their trips.

Pre: checking

Checking basic info like hours, parking, and directions

During: focusing on details

Prioritizing destinations, coordinating with others

After: sharing

Sharing experiences, tracking spending

Key Insight

Planning is not linear. It's a phase-based decision-making activity that spans before, during, and after travel—and varies with group size and familiarity with the destination.

User flow

Iterate and enhance the feature with user feedback

User flow

Wireframe

Branding

Branding & Visual Identity

Primary color

#ADC7BB

Inspired by sunshine and summer travel, this yellow brings energy, warmth, and a sense of movement.

#C4DED2

A calming green that evokes nature and serenity—forests, oceans, and the morning sky.

Secondary color

Icon set

Typography

Mascot design for offline marketing

Read more about our mascot design for Fliptrip

Mascot design for offline marketing

Created a mascot system adaptable for offline marketing (e.g. festivals, regional themes), adding charm and brand recall across cultures.

Click on that button to learn more about the FlipTrip Mascot case study

See More

Sperta
Branding

The decision making platform

Type

B2C

Timeline

Jan - Dec, 2021

Rewards

MIT sandbox 2019-2020

Tool

Usertesting
Figma
ProtoPie
Adobe Creative cloud

About the project

A travel itinerary exploring & planning application helps users easily schedule their trips by visualizing itineraries and providing helpful information. It also helps families and friends manage time, attractions, budget, and expenses during the journey.

My contribution

In this project, I led the project with 2 designers on

  • Strategic Discovery & user research

  • Mobile application design & optimization

  • Visual definition & branding material

The problem

Ample but vague travel information is frustrating especially for self-traveling planners

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed people's travel behavior. Social trend has indicated that people start to seek additional travel destinations and methods and tend to plan and operate by themselves.
However, travelers often encounter problems such as:

Being attracted by travel posts on social media, but don’t know their location

It takes too much time and effort to find information to plan the trip.

Group travelers have difficulty aligning travel time, scheduling destination, and spends

As a result

"We wasted a lot time planning our last trip because we didn't know at first that some places were close."

"I have to manually google everything before deciding where to go and how."

"I'll avoid visiting these places and stick to the ones I know."

" I feel frustrated planning everything from scratch with little help."

The solution

Fliptrip: visualizing your itinerary!
Share your trip with ease
Discover

This is the page for discovery, providing the latest and hottest travel contents.

Plan your trip
My trips and profile

This page for managing trips. Allow users to track current trips, create new trips and review past trips. Plan with your friends, travel with your friends

Search enhancement & text recognition

When searching on FlipTrip, we help you target places, hotels, flights, activities, restaurants with smart filter
When posting travel notes, we use text recognition to help you complete your content with minimum effort.

Research & define

Before we paint the product with pretty pixels

Before starting the development process, I conducted in-depth research, including user interviews and competitive analysis.

What is “Planning”?

To better understand "planning my trip" and our core user story, we posted surveys on social media like WeChat and Facebook when the holidays approached. Instead of talking and interviewing users' planning behaviors, we observed their planning process before traveling and interviewed them after their trips.

Pre: checking

  • how to get there

  • when is it open

  • do they have parking

During: focusing on details

  • review what's available to them

  • prioritize what to do

After: sharing

  • share photos and video

  • split bills

Key finding

Too often we use the term planning to describe both an activity before visiting. It is a common misunderstanding

Planning is a phase-based activity where we make an effort to understand what is available and make some decisions around what, how, and when to do it. And it can, and it does happen at any time pre, during and after the journey.

Concept refinement

Target users

  • Young people from 18 to 38 years old

  • Both solo and group travelers

  • Hate to waste time

  • Love exploring, sharing and traveling

User goal

  • seek for better ways to plan trips from scheduling to the end of this journey, especially itineraries.

  • want to create and share travel note easier

  • be able to share trip plan between group travelers

Value for users

  • a community with the same interest in travel.

  • Maximum savings of time spent on scheduling.

  • enhance the bond among team members, by planning, traveling, and sharing

Value for Fliptrip

  • In-app purchasing, business partners with services such as hotels, airlines and tickets booking

  • Advertising opportunities for coming events, shows, and festivals

Key strategy

Build an online ecosystem of tourism on the application itself, which provides useful travel information

Visualizing itinerary with related information recommendations

Building travel blog feature in the app, helping users create travel notes with routes and tips at ease.

Co-editing, allowing group travelers to share trip schedules and notes

Branding

Visual identification
Primary color

#ADC7BB

The yellow of sunshine, summer beach, wood and your leather travel bag, promotes community cohesion, creates a feeling of happiness, joy, energy and relentless movement.

#C4DED2

The green of the forest, the ocean, the winter snow and the foggy morning sky, creating a feeling of vastness, immensity but serenity. Color represents trust, tranquility

Secondary color
Icon set
Typography
Mascot design for offline marketing

Read more about our mascot design for Fliptrip

User flow

Iterate and enhance the feature with user feedback
User flow
Wireframe
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