Overview
ALLABOARD is a collaborative trip planning tool for families and groups. It takes in preferences to recommend flights, hotels, activities, and restaurants, then lets groups vote and edit a shared itinerary together in real time, standardizing trip planning in one place.
The Challenge
How do you design for a group that can't agree on anything?
Group trip planning is socially complex — different schedules, budgets, and preferences collide. Existing tools either oversimplify coordination or overwhelm with options. The challenge: a collaborative space where everyone could contribute and align without adding friction.
Research & Discovery
Listening to the frustrated planner
I interviewed frequent group travelers and built personas from the results. Four themes dominated every conversation:
No single platform handled the full planning process. Previously, people stitched together docs, group chats, and screenshots.
Decision fatigue was universal and too many open options led to paralysis. Groups reverted to verbal agreements without logging them.
Visibility was the top request: who confirmed what, what's still open.
The "organizer burden" was real. One person absorbed all coordination work, making it feel like project management for one.
Design Process
A shared space on a single platform.
I began with low-fi wireframes mapping the core flows. Creating a trip, inviting collaborators, proposing and voting on activities, confirming plans to test the information architecture.
The hi-fi prototype settled on a map-anchored layout with a collapsible itinerary sidebar, keeping spatial and sequential views visible together. A "consensus bar" on each activity card showed group agreement without separate polls or comment threads, and the timeline auto-restructured whenever plans changed.
Hi-fi prototype · Figma · Collaborative itinerary view
Usability Testing
We ran two rounds of moderated usability testing on two flows: activity-proposal-to-confirmation, and onboarding a new collaborator.
Round one surfaced confusion in the invite flow (a code, not the expected link) and an ambiguous confirmation gesture. After iterating, round two showed a 40% faster "plan a day" completion time and noticeably higher confidence in the collaborative mechanics.
Outcome & Learnings
ALLABOARD reinforced the principle that the hardest product decisions are about what to leave out. Twenty features started on the whiteboard; six shipped, and every cut made the remaining flows better.
Collaborative tools fail not because they lack features but because too many features create new coordination costs. This product doesn't eliminate disagreement, but makes it faster to resolve.