ReadySet

One trip. One shared plan.

Role: UX/UI designer
Type: Concept project
Tools

ReadySet is a mobile app concept for planning trips as a group. It brings suggestions, voting and an agreed itinerary together to help participants make decisions collectively.

Problem: Trip ideas and decisions get lost in conversations, and bringing them together into one plan takes extra work.
Goal: Design a shared space where a group can suggest options, choose between them and build an itinerary together.
Outcome: An interactive app prototype tested through selected tasks.

Research

I wanted to understand how groups organise trips and when planning becomes complicated and chaotic. I conducted three in-depth interviews with people who organise group travel.

I asked about their recent trips: the biggest difficulties, how they shared information and made decisions, and what they wanted to simplify. These exploratory conversations helped me identify problems worth investigating further.

Findings

I grouped the interview quotes by theme in FigJam. Three connected difficulties emerged:

Information gets lost in conversations: Messaging apps make it easy to share ideas quickly, but harder to find specific suggestions and decisions later.
Organising requires more tools: Links, spreadsheets and messages hold different parts of the plan. Putting the whole picture together means switching between them.
Final decisions are hard to identify: Polls and agreements stay buried in chat history. It isn't always clear what has been approved and what still needs discussion.

ReadySet - problem areas and research synthesis

I translated the findings into How Might We questions, Jobs to Be Done and a storyboard. These defined three jobs for the app: organise suggestions, show the progress of decisions and provide easy access to the final plan.

Based on this, I divided the app into “Planning” and “Itinerary”. The first is a space for sharing ideas and making decisions; the second shows the agreed plan. This distinction became the foundation for the information architecture and screen design.

Solution and key decisions

I organised suggestions into categories such as accommodation and transport. Each suggestion has its own status, voting and comments, keeping the discussion tied to a specific topic. Participants can see what needs a decision without searching through chat history.

The concept includes adding suggestions via a link, with the name and image fetched automatically to reduce manual input. Selected options go into an itinerary that can be exported as a PDF and kept for the trip.

I based the interface on Material Design components, adapting their appearance to ReadySet. This let me focus on the app's structure while keeping familiar interaction patterns.

Prototype testing

I tested the clickable prototype with a few friends. I asked them to add a category and a suggestion, and navigate the app. I wanted to assess whether the structure and basic actions were clear.

Participants responded positively to the clarity of the information and ease of navigation. However, this was an initial assessment with people I knew, rather than a test of a whole group planning a real trip.

Results and reflections

The resulting prototype brings together collecting ideas, making decisions and accessing an itinerary. The biggest challenge was presenting a lot of information and states while keeping suggestions clearly distinct from agreed decisions.

The next step would be to test the app while planning a real trip. This would help assess group collaboration, the need for a guest mode and whether the solution helps people reach decisions. Interface accessibility and the reliability of fetching data from links would need separate validation.