Designing a sustainable digital travel solution
About the project
In an era where sustainability awareness is growing, the tourism industry faces a critical challenge: balancing the desire for exploration with the need for responsible travel. While many travellers recognise the importance of minimising their environmental impact, sustainability also extends to supporting local communities, preserving cultural heritage, and promoting ethical tourism.
This case study explores the research, design, and development of Tripeco, a digital travel solution aimed at providing travellers with a unified platform for planning responsible and enriching journeys.
As an academic project, it prioritised the UX process over visual design, focusing on functionality and usability. If developed further, the visuals would also be refined.
Project type
Student project at NTNU
Date
February–May 2022
My role
Designer and researcher
Team
Even Elton
Gina Halvorsen
Renate Bakkeslett Hagen
Grade
A
Why travel needs a sustainability makeover
Tourism accounts for approximately 8% of global carbon emissions, with transport—particularly aviation—being the largest contributor. However, sustainability in tourism extends beyond carbon emissions. It encompasses economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental conservation, ensuring that travel benefits both local communities and ecosystems.
Despite the growing availability of sustainable options, travellers often struggle with fragmented planning processes that require multiple platforms to book transport, accommodation, and activities, making it difficult to identify truly sustainable choices without a deep understanding of value chains.
This project aimed to develop a integrated, user-centred travel service that simplifies planning and makes sustainable options more accessible. It focuses on providing budget-conscious travellers with an organised, easy-to-use tool to help them stay in control and make more sustainable choices.
Sustainable tourism must balance economic growth (profits), social inclusion (people), and environmental conservation (planet).
Travellers' biggest challenges and how we can fix them
To ensure the solution met real traveler needs, the project began with a clear objective: to identify key pain points in travel planning and explore how technology could promote sustainable choices. Our approach incorporated:
Literature review to understand existing research on travel behaviour and sustainability.
Surveys to understand travel habits and sustainability concerns.
Personas, scenarios and journey mapping to represent different traveller types, their needs, and frustrations, while mapping their travel experiences to identify pain points and opportunities.
Card sorting exercises to refine information architecture.
Competitive benchmarking of travel services like TripAdvisor, Hostelworld, and Momondo.
Usability testing to refine the prototype.
Surveying travel habits
The survey gathered basic demographics before exploring travel habits. It looked at essential travel devices, preferred services before, during, and after a trip, as well as accommodation and transport choices. Participants also shared their top priorities—comfort, sustainability, price, or location—and explained how they organise their plans and the biggest challenges they face while backpacking.
Mapping the traveller’s mind
Next, we explored how travellers naturally group and structure content. This heat map visualises the agreement scores from a card sorting exercise, where each cell shows how strongly participants agreed on placing a specific card (listed along the bottom) into a particular category (listed on the left). The darker the colour, the higher the agreement, with values ranging from low to high percentages. Blank cells mean the card was either not sorted into that category at all, or just once.
Heat map of agreement scores from card sorting. A darker colour means a stronger agreement on the card’s category.
Key insights from early research
Travel planning is fragmented: Users rely on multiple platforms (e.g., Booking.com, Google Maps, Airbnb), leading to information overload and difficulty keeping track of bookings, tickets, and itineraries. Email often serves as the central hub for managing bookings, making organisation crucial.
Sustainable choices are complex: Pro-environmental behaviour is influenced by multiple psychological factors, with incentives and ecolabels playing a limited role.
Sustainability is a secondary priority: While many travellers express environmental concerns, convenience and cost often take precedence. Survey results confirm that participants prefer not to confront their carbon footprint and rate sustainability lower than other travel factors.
Mobile-centric travel habits: Travellers rely heavily on their mobile devices for both planning and navigating trips.
Consistent app design: Existing travel service apps follow a uniform approach to navigation and communication.
Limited focus on sustainability: Many travel services lack strong sustainability features, making eco-friendly choices harder.
Rise of “super apps”: Combining multiple travel functions into one platform could simplify planning and encourage sustainable choices.
Identifying user groups
The target users of this project fall into two main categories: travellers and hosts. Travellers are further divided into two types:
The budget-conscious traveller – Prioritises low-cost travel over comfort, often staying in hostels or with locals. Prefers trains, buses, and ride-sharing for affordability, sometimes aligning with sustainable choices. However, safety remains a key concern.
The comfort-seeking traveller – Values convenience and quality over budget. Prefers flying over ground transport and hotels over hostels. Cost-saving choices are made by preference rather than necessity, with safety also a priority.
Hosts are individuals who rent out their space or offer experiences, such as guided tours. They enjoy meeting new people and tend to be open and service-minded.
Personas, user scenarios, and journey maps were also created to deepen the understanding of these groups, but are omitted here for brevity.
From insights to action
With the insights gathered, Tripeco was designed as a super app, combining transport, accommodation, and experiences—often rooted in local communities. Travellers prefer locally owned stays, transport, and businesses, as well as community activities. Inspired by WeChat, Tripeco streamlines travel by keeping everything connected, saving users time and effort.
Tripeco combines multiple services into a single app.
Low-fidelity prototyping
Low fidelity prototypes of Tripeco.
Since many travel service apps already exist, the prototypes were designed with a clear understanding of essential features and structure. This allowed for more refined elements from the start, making them closer to mid-fidelity wireframes.
Traveller prototype
Navigation design: Initially featured a bottom tab bar with five sections: Trips, Explore, Chat, Meetup, and Account.
Visual hierarchy: Used a greyscale design to focus on layout and navigation.
Search functionality: The Explore page had a single search bar, but requiring users to input their location multiple times proved inefficient.
Search results issue: Transportation and accommodation were initially combined in search results, causing confusion, so they were separated.
Itinerary improvements: The Trips page originally included an itinerary but lacked a calendar and filters, making long-term planning difficult. These were added for better organization.
Host prototype
Initial merging idea: The traveller and host prototypes were initially designed with similar navigation.
User confusion risk: Keeping both in one interface required switching modes, which added complexity. To improve clarity, the host prototype was separated.
Medium-fidelity prototyping and testing
The low-fidelity prototype was developed into a more detailed medium-fidelity prototype to provide users with an experience closer to a finished product before further testing.
Key changes in the traveller prototype
Improved search experience: The Explore screen search bar was split into two fields for destination and departure location, with search suggestions added.
Clearer search results: Users now select transport or accommodation before viewing results, reducing confusion. Filters were also simplified.
Navigation refinements: The Meetups tab was merged with Explore, aligning with user expectations from the card sort.
Key changes in the host prototype
Navigation changes: Initially, the host prototype featured a separate Listings tab. However, since users do not frequently update their listings, it was moved under the Account tab for a more intuitive experience.
Visual and interaction enhancements
Added colour, images, and content for a more lifelike feel.
Active states introduced in the tab bar, highlighting the current screen with colour behind icons.
Usability testing and insights
The traveller prototype was tested with four potential users to identify usability challenges, which gave valuable insights:
Confusion in the trips tab:
Users were unclear whether transportation options listed under Trips were available to book or if they were already booked (itinerary).
Since the active tab state removed the screen label, it was unclear that this was an itinerary page.
Sustainability option in search:
Users expected a sustainability filter among travel options rather than discovering it later on the results page.
Accommodation search refinement:
Users wanted more granular search options, such as filtering accommodations by specific areas within a city.
Host contact confusion:
The prototype included a pre-filled chat with the host for easy access.
Users struggled to understand how to contact a host if no prior conversation existed.
Improvements after usability tests
Following the usability tests, several refinements were implemented:
Navigation and accessibility
Trips was renamed to My Trips and moved to the second tab for better clarity.
The calendar in the traveller prototype was expanded to resemble the more detailed version in the host prototype.
Visual enhancements
The active tab state was changed to black with white text for improved visibility.
Button colors were adjusted to a lighter turquoise with darker text to meet accessibility contrast standards.
Search and filters
Sustainability was added as a filter alongside travel options.
Accommodation search options were expanded to allow for filtering by specific city areas.
Host contact feature
Instead of a redesign, an automatic message in the chat will indicate when a host is available to contact.
High-fidelity prototyping
Traveller prototype
The traveller prototype makes it easy to get started, whether logging in, signing up, or exploring with limited access. Apple and Google login options streamline payments, and the app remembers the last-used mode, defaulting to traveller for new users.
A bottom-tab navigation keeps key features within reach:
Explore brings together destination search, transport, accommodation, and activities. A refined dual-field search bar simplifies planning, while sustainable travel options are highlighted early. Inspired by industry standards, ground transport is prioritised, with flights hidden unless enabled. Nearby attractions, meetups, and recommendations enhance travel discovery.
My Trips neatly organises bookings in chronological order, with a calendar for long-term planning. Provider logos and host images help differentiate reservations, and tickets are easily accessible.
Chat connects users with hosts and fellow travellers, linking conversations to bookings for easy reference.
Account centralises preferences, payment settings, and profile management.
Host prototype
The host prototype is built for efficient booking management, keeping key functions easily accessible.
Overview acts as a dashboard, displaying upcoming reservations and key notifications, with quick-access buttons for messaging or calling guests.
Chat mirrors the traveller version, keeping booking-related conversations organised.
Calendar helps hosts manage their schedule at a glance.
Insights provide performance metrics, including ratings, earnings, and booking trends.
Account allows hosts to switch roles, manage listings, and update settings. Visual differences between traveller and host modes prevent confusion.
The impact of a seamless and greener travel solution
Tripeco’s design received positive feedback from usability tests, with users appreciating its ability to streamline travel planning and integrate sustainable choices. Users noted that the interface was intuitive, making it easier to find and compare eco-friendly travel options.
Key anticipated benefits include:
Reduced carbon footprint by nudging users toward greener transport options.
Enhanced trip organization, reducing stress and improving the travel experience.
Stronger traveler-host connections, fostering more meaningful cultural exchanges.
Next moves
While the prototype successfully demonstrated the feasibility of a super app for sustainable travel, real-world implementation would require extensive partnerships with booking platforms and transportation services similar to other meta-search sites. Additionally, the challenge of user adoption remains—users need clear incentives to actively choose sustainable options over traditional ones.
Future iterations should explore:
AI-driven recommendations to further personalize travel plans.
Gamification and incentives to encourage sustainable choices.
Partnerships with eco-friendly travel providers to expand options.