Case Study
Role
UI/UI Designer
Timeline
March 2022 - November 2022
Responsibilities
Conducted research, analysed the data, built design
Product name
SetnGo
Context
For my Master’s dissertation, I tackled a frustration I know first-hand: organising an independent trip can be time-consuming, overwhelming, and riddled with fragmented information. I set out to create SetnGo—a web app that gathers a traveller’s preferences up-front, curates destinations accordingly, and then turns those choices into a complete, map-based itinerary in minutes.
PROBLEM
Excessive information has a huge impact on traveller decision-making
It’s 11 p.m. on a Friday. My friend Chau’s laptop is glowing with 24 open tabs—hotels, blogs, train schedules, and three different map windows. Her annual leave is locked in, but the itinerary is still a messy jigsaw.
“I only have seven days off,” she sighs. “Why is planning taking longer than the holiday itself?”
I felt that pain too, so it became the main problem that I wanted to dig deeper into and find a way to solve the puzzle.
With travel, there are so many decisions that you have to make. And so if there isn't any sort of theme, it can make decision-making really difficult. (Iterate podcast, 2019)
PROJECT GOALS
Understand how people plan their trips
Surface the key pain points in the way people is currently planning their trips.
Make travel planning more efficient and enjoyable
Design and validate an experience that reduces planning effort while retaining a sense of control and discovery.
Understand the problem
Personalisation and informativeness are the keys
Driven to simplify and enhance the efficiency of travel planning, I began with secondary research to gain a deeper understanding of the issue and painpoint market gaps. I discovered that informativeness, personalisation, interactiveness, and accessibility are crucial elements, as they ensure travellers receive relevant, comprehensive, and up-to-date services that meet their needs.
Travellers are more independent and prefer to pursue their own preferences and schedules as they are more technologically skilled and they seek value for money and time. Travel platforms should provide comprehensive and personalised travel products and services that match travellers’ needs. (Buhalis & Law, 2008)
To understand the experience of travel planning and validate what I found in the previous research, I conducted qualitative and quantitative research, which involved 6 interviews and 50 participants doing a survey.
Out of 50 responses…
Travellers tend to find travel inspiration through personal recommendations (e.g., friends, family) and online social media
Most of them do plan before traveling, and they consider it very important
Top 3 reasons for travel planning are to save time while travelling, to prioritisise & maximise experiences, and to stay in the budget.
/image of surveys
The market has little to no personalisation aspect
While keeping the above findings in mind, I then analysed the three most popular travel platforms and found out that all of them have very little personalisation aspect, and they only provide general information that is not relevant to all people. This shows that travel content providers fail to capture travellers’ needs and provide relevant information, as travellers nowadays tend to reach out to others’ opinions for authentic and engaging experiences rather than getting it from highly-produced travel content.
pain points
Our approach
Crafting the user journey
After gathering insights from my research, I built a user-journey map to understand how many stages a traveller must pass through, along with their goals and pain points at each step. The journey comprises four stages: discovery, information search, comparing alternatives, and booking. I focused on stages 2 and 3, where users typically become stuck because information overload makes decisions difficult.
/user-journey image
Brainstorming design concept
Three products inspired my solution: Pinterest, Duolingo, and Routeperfect.
Pinterest shows how relevant ideas can be generated from user preferences.
Duolingo’s interactive onboarding keeps users engaged and tailors the experience to each person.
RoutePerfect demonstrates how a live trip map can simplify end-to-end planning.
/Influencer pic
Visualising the app
My concept guides users through the planning process—from gathering inspiration to turning it into an actionable plan. It starts with onboarding, where travellers answer basic questions (destination country, how many people will be in the trip, preferred activities, budget, and more). These answers build a user profile that the system uses to generate an ideal list of places; travellers can then add their selections to a personalised and easy-to-keep track map.
/sketch images and wireframe
/user flow image
Prototyping and iterating the ideas
I conducted two rounds of usability testing, and the final design reflects the insights gathered from those sessions. Three major improvements emerged:
Richer trip-planning pages with key details (travel time, opening hours, etc.).
Clearer, more concise onboarding questions.
A redesigned profile page that surfaces saved trips and preferences.
/image of improvement
Outcomes & IMPACTs
Discover destinations and experiences tailored to travellers' experiences
SetnGo uses a quick onboarding quiz to capture your travel style, interests, and budget, turning generic lists into hand-picked inspiration. This feature tackles the information overload and irrelevance pain point by giving personalised information that is relevant and important to the users.
Curated feed: The platform surfaces destinations, activities, and hidden gems that match users' profiles—no endless scrolling required.
Time saved: Relevant options appear first, streamlining research and letting users start building an itinerary immediately.
Dynamic planning and managing trips
Most travellers juggle several apps to research, bookmark, map, and book—SetnGo unifies everything in a single workspace. This step-by-step flow provides clear guidance for users to follow. Users can:
Discover and save: Browse personalised destination cards and tap Save; each selection automatically drops into a trip map.
Refine on the go: Add or remove stops until the itinerary feels right, then drag-and-drop to reorder.
Book with context: Integrated price and timing data between sites let travellers compare options and reserve transport or accommodation, and add to the map without leaving the platform.
Stay organised: A dashboard groups past and upcoming trips, making it easy to revisit plans and build on them later.
Community stories and shared inspiration
SetnGo turns travellers into trusted and up-to-date guides, letting everyone verify information and spark new ideas.
Post authentic stories: Upload photos, tips, and itineraries from completed trips to showcase real-world experiences.
Inspire & inform: Each story surfaces practical details—costs, opening hours, transit notes—so others spend less time hunting across external sites.
Save what matters: Readers can one-click save any destination or adopt an entire itinerary, instantly adding it to their own planning board.
Build collective credibility: Crowd-sourced updates keep destination data fresh and reliable, benefiting every future traveller.
REFLECTIONS
What I’d do differently…
This was my first completed UX project, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience the full UX process. Along the way, I learned several key lessons:
1. Focus on the Big Picture: I initially got bogged down in details and potential solutions, which led to analysis paralysis. I realized I needed to understand the problem as a whole before diving into specifics, which helped me ask better questions and make more progress.
2. Empathise with Users: At first, I assumed my target audience shared my travel preferences. Engaging with other travelers provided me with diverse perspectives, allowing me to design more effectively for their needs.
3. Embrace Iteration and Feedback: I learned that continuous feedback and iteration are crucial for improvement. While some feedback was challenging to accept, approaching it objectively accelerated my design enhancements and led to better solutions for users.
If I have more time, …
There are some ideas that I would want to further look into:
1. Mobile application. People nowadays tend to use their phones to find travel information, and it is handy to use both before and during the trip. However, I considered this to be a challenge to design an application with a significant amount of information on a small screen and with more limited functions compared to desktops.
2. The source of information. It remains a challenge to verify the source of information for this application. One of the solutions that was suggested by my examiners is to turn users into content generators, personalising each profile rather than relying on large, automated data sets I currently lack.
