Wanderlust: Travel with Local Guides and AI

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project started from the admiration of the various "cultures, lifestyles, and environments" that this world is consisted of. Whether it may be a domestic or international trip, it's surprising to find out how much "new culture and tradition" one will approach while traveling. However, as we all may have experienced, traveling to a new place could be frustrating in a variety of ways, from the planning phase and throughout the trip itself. Thus, we were truly inspired to design and develop an efficient travel service that empowers users to feel and be more prepared when traveling to a new place with new cultures and customs.

What it does

Wanderlust utilizes "both human-interaction and AI-interaction" to provide users with an intuitive and efficient way to be aware of "important travel information" real-time, and to explore destinations with different cultures and customs with "local guides" to help them. The human-interaction was achieved by applying a "simple social platform" for travelers to interact with fellow users who are also local guides for their hometowns; the AI-interaction was achieved by integrating "ChatGPT" into the website in order to help inform users of important travel information like "safety guidelines, visa requirements, transportation suggestions", etc. Beside these two services, Wanderlust provides users with a "booking platform" where they can chat with locals and with AI while also searching and browsing for flights and hotels with the best deals.

How we built it

In terms of how we "managed" the project, we strived to utilize the short time frame to the fullest by creating a "sprint-like project timeline" to roughly follow. This way, as we built through our project, we were able to keep track of what was done, what is being done, and what should be done in the next few hours.

In terms of "tools and methods," we conducted a short user research to inform and guide ourselves into design and development, and utilized Figma to prototype our website. Due to the sake of time, we rapidly prototyped the webpages straight in the higher-fidelity range, and conducted simple usability tests throughout to identify areas to improve and iterate constantly.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into were first the time differences between us as a team. Although we did not have much team conflicts, it was difficult sharing each other's thoughts, opinions, and updates consistently. However, we were able to adapt and adjust our schedules fairly quickly, and successfully communicated the project thoroughly.

Another challenge that we ran into was that we may have planned our project slightly larger in scale, and thus we had to make changes and adjustments to the project plan through the two days we had. Nevertheless, that did not affect the quality of our project, and we managed to produce high-quality of work

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishments that we're proud of is that despite the difference in fields of expertise, we were able to collaboratively build upon each other's works to design a fully interactive, mid-fidelity prototype on Figma, as well as the development of frontend and backend for the design.

What we learned

Despite the short amount of time, we learned a lot about the pain points and frustrations of the travel industry, as well as the efforts it takes to provide a meaningful solution. We also learned a lot about working in a small, cross-functional team, and communicating and collaborating to produce a successful project.

What's next for Wanderlust: Travel with Local Guides and AI

The next steps would be testing and validating our design and product, to identify areas to improve our product further. We also aim to visualize a strong future for Wanderlust, by integrating various features that could help out a traveler in a different way than other top-tier services. For example, we want to think about integrating a Smart Translator that can easily operate to provide translation in different styles of language, like casual vs formal.

Built With

• figjam
• figma