What is Aeroplan?
Aeroplan is an AI-powered travel planning app that syncs with academic schedules to align flights with breaks and surface the best deals, so college students can book at the right time with less effort and lower cost.
This was created during a 24-hour UX FestSLO design-a-thon, where our team took a design thinking approach to develop a solution for the following prompt:
Create a mobile or web prototype that helps users plan and manage efficient travel experiences, offering personalized suggestions that optimize their trips for time, cost, and convenience.
INITIAL DISCOVERY
A Recurring Frustration For Students...
Students want to travel home for breaks and weekends, but tight budgets and demanding academic schedules make it hard to find affordable options and plan ahead conveniently, especially when classes and extracurriculars take up most of their time.
PROBLEM
Why Is Traveling Home So Difficult For Students?
We surveyed 120+ college students on a Google Form, including in-state, out-of-state, and international students, to measure the most common obstacles in planning trips back home.
Key Takeaways:
We also interviewed 1st–5th year college students to better understand the motivations, needs, and pain points that shape how they plan trips home.
Common frustrations we heard included:
DEFINING
Our Core Need
To synthesize the needs uncovered in our research, we started to frame “How might we” questions that captured those insights, and ultimately narrowed our focus to:
IDEATION
How do we get there?
We started by creating a user flow that maps the journey across key pages from start to flight booking, targeting key pain points we identified: affordable prices, faster browsing of flight options, and bookings that fit academic schedules.
"Work Together Alone" - The best ideas come from a mix of collaboration and independent work.
Then, we ran multiple rounds of Crazy 8’s and Dot Voting System to explore different layouts and features, then combined the strongest ideas from each iteration into more refined concepts in our wireframing process.
Wireframing
Identity | Design System
Alongside our iterations, we created a design system to maintain consistent branding across the app. We chose a clean, friendly visual style to make the travel booking experience feel approachable and easy to navigate for college students.
Let’s Test It!
Before finalizing to hi-fidelity designs, we ran 10 think-aloud usability tests on the mid-fidelity prototype to validate that the app was intuitive and effective for our intended users, then used affinity mapping to synthesize findings into clear, actionable insights.
THE SOLUTION:
Introducing Aeroplan, the one-stop solution for student travel!
FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
With more time, I would have loved to dive deeper into:
Exploring more AI-focused iterations during the wireframe/low-fi stage by testing multiple approaches and design directions.
Conducting additional mid-fidelity user testing to validate updates, refine remaining issues, and ensure user needs were fully met.
This was an amazing learning opportunity to explore AI concepts in a mobile app. I’m really proud of what my team and I built from start-to-end in just 24 hours.
