Trailmix

Team: Victor Tran, Richard Duong

Timeline: January 2025 to Present

Tools used: Figma, Jitter, React, SwiftUI, Next.js, Vercel, AWS

Role: UX Designer, Brand Designer, Frontend iOS & Web Engineer

🏆 Goals

1. Create a platform to help unify all of the fragmented information
2. Enable travel inspiration that has easy to access information
3. Make sharing recommendations a fun and simple process

📈 Non-Goals and other considerations:

• Allowing businesses to work closely with content creators to boost engagement
• Enabling interactive collections to help the trip planning process for users

⚠️ Problem: Travel planning is too fragmented and outdated

Planning a trip is overwhelming. Gen Z travelers need a quick way to validate recommendations and explore new options. Short-form travel content can make trip planning more engaging through natural discovery.

✉️ Context: Young people care about travel experiences

Younger travelers are willing to spend more money on travel experiences as shown through research by McKinsey & Company.

✏️ Defining product requirements

Discussion with co-founder to establish the information architecture for our product vision.

💭 Why:

To define the problem and agree upon the approach. I wanted to answer what our product would look like and why.

📚 Learnings and Decisions made

• iOS is our primary platform because of wide & ease of adoption
• Chose short-form content for rich information for travelers to explore and share
• Chose travel planning space because of the lack of innovation the industry has seen with recent technologies and ideas

🌈 Branding

Developed a visual style to help shape the direction and purpose of the app. I created the color palette, typography, and logo for Trailmix with tools like Adobe Illustrator and Figma!

💭 Why:

A well defined brand can establish a stronger sense of trust between our app and travelers

📚 Learnings

• Branding can come from a lot of influences from other products you respect
• A distinct visual style can elevate the overall polish and feel of the app
• Marketing relies heavily on a solid brand identity to establish the product

🔎 Interface Exploration

Designed mid-fidelty mockups to find key features expand further upon

💭 Why:

Wanted to see what creative new ideas we could bring into our app through varied iterations of core features in the app.

📚 Learnings and Decisions made

• Reducing friction & increasing user rentention would require us to build a web app for video uploads
• Staying lean on features & focusing on the core experience is the most sustainable approach
• Creating a new social media platform would need a lot of creator outreach

💤 Before:

✨ After:

💬 User Feedback

I interviewed roughly 10+ people on the features and concepts of the app and received the following feedback:

1. Visual consistency matters
   The trip summary screen's design was praised but felt disconnected from the rest of the app. Unifying the visual language could enhance overall cohesion.

2. Group planning flow needs clarity
   Users want clearer onboarding to understand how group trip planning unfolds — including who does what, when, and how the AI helps facilitate that flow.

3. Text-based AI interaction resonates
   The idea of a chatbot that proactively helps break down tasks or reminds users to plan was highly appreciated. It humanizes the experience and aids memory.

4. Content hierarchy & accessibility work well
   Users appreciated the UI’s font choices, accessibility, and color contrast — a strong foundation to maintain as the product evolves.

💥 Impact:

We had over 190 visitors, 500 page views, and a 47% bounce rate within a week of launching our marketing website.

⭐ What's Next?

The work is still in progress! I will be releasing a beta Summer 2025 to get the full experience out. We're already hitting solid metrics with minimal advertising, with our original goal being 100 visitors to our marketing website.

We want to continue building upon the feedback we get from travelers. In the future, we're going to explore methods to integrate social planning with friends into the current trip planning process.