American Odyssey
INTRODUCTION | RESEARCH | EMPATHIZE | DESIGN | TESTING | REFLECTION
Travel should feel exciting, not overwhelming. American Odyssey brings clarity to U.S. trip planning by turning scattered information into curated guidance, personalized suggestions, and a seamless planning experience.
Toolkit: Figma, Adobe CC | Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI designer
INTRODUCTION
The Purpose
American Odyssey aims to make exploring the United States simple, inspiring, and deeply personal by giving travelers a curated home for discovering destinations, planning trips, and uncovering meaningful experiences. The platform blends beautifully crafted guides, interactive maps, and an AI travel companion to help users find the best of every state, city, and region while building trips that feel uniquely their own.
The Challenge
The idea for American Odyssey surfaced after recognizing how overwhelming and fragmented U.S. trip planning has become. Travelers bounce between dozens of sources, from blogs to review sites to scattered map tools, often piecing together mismatched information that lacks context or personalization. Even seasoned travelers struggle to find trustworthy recommendations, while beginners don’t know where to start. In a country with endless options, most tools either drown users in noise or offer bare-bones itinerary builders that lack inspiration.
How might we help travelers plan and explore U.S. destinations with clarity, inspiration, and confidence, all in one place?
The Objective
Design a mobile app that helps travelers explore U.S. destinations with curated guides, interactive maps, and personalized trip planning tools.
Create a seamless digital experience that supports travelers in the moment, reducing research overload and minimizing the need to switch between multiple apps during the planning and exploration process.
RESEARCH
Current travel-planning pain points
According to McKinsey & Company, domestic travel continues to dominate in the Americas—with domestic trips accounting for 75 % of travel spending and lodging nights expected to reach 19 billion annually by 2030. Thus, I wanted to learn about current competitor resources and understand user pain-points when planning U.S.-based travel.
Research Goals
Understand how travelers plan U.S. trips and what motivates their destination choices
Identify key frustrations users experience when researching, organizing, and customizing domestic travel
Determine which exploration and discovery features are most valuable for travelers when choosing activities, guides, or cities
Analyze current resources and feature offerings from major travel-planning competitor apps
Validate the need for a curated, all-in-one U.S. travel platform supported by personalized trip insights and AI assistance
Key Findings
The competitive analysis shows that existing travel apps are either cluttered with crowdsourced noise, too utilitarian, or limited in scope. This leaves a gap for a curated, U.S.-focused platform that combines inspiration, planning tools, and intelligent guidance in one place. American Odyssey can capitalize on this by offering clean curation, an intuitive exploration map, and a contextual AI assistant, creating a more focused and enjoyable planning experience than any current competitor.
Interviewing Users on U.S. Travel Planning
To better understand how people actually plan their trips, I spoke with five travelers through phone calls and video interviews. The goal was to unpack the real process behind choosing destinations, building itineraries, and discovering things to do across the U.S.
These conversations helped reveal which tools travelers rely on, where they feel the most friction, and what ultimately prevents them from planning the kind of trips they want.
Travel planning feels scattered.
Users move between countless tabs, guides, blogs, and apps. The process feels disorganized and mentally draining instead of exciting.
Personalized recommendations cut through the noise.
Users want suggestions aligned with their budget, travel style, and timeframe. Generic lists don’t help them make decisions.
Too many apps ruin the flow
Planning a trip often involves 5 or more platforms. Important details get lost, and the experience becomes fragmented. A single, cohesive tool would solve this.
Trip organization is a major pain point.
Even experienced travelers struggle to keep activities, notes, bookings, and ideas in one place. Many rely on messy Google Docs or scattered screenshots.
People want trusted curation, not endless options.
Interviewees said they often feel paralyzed by the volume of search results and conflicting recommendations. They want fewer, better options.
AI can simplify decision-making.
Multiple users expressed interest in quick, personalized answers—like what to pack, how long to spend somewhere, or which activities fit their schedule. They want an AI assistant that reduces guesswork and speeds up planning.
EMPATHIZE
Interviewing Users on U.S. Travel Planning
The competitive analysis and user interviews revealed how fragmented and overwhelming U.S. trip planning can be, and how differently travelers approach building their ideal experience. These insights helped me shift from abstract assumptions to a clearer picture of real user needs, motivations, and frustrations. From there, I translated what I learned into concrete visual frameworks that allowed me to empathize with travelers and begin defining what American Odyssey should become.
Primary Persona
Based on patterns from my user interviews and competitive insights, I created a single primary persona that reflects the core traveler American Odyssey is designed to support. While people plan trips in different ways, the most consistent needs came from travelers who feel overwhelmed by scattered information and want a simpler, more curated approach to planning U.S. trips. Because American Odyssey aims to make travel planning clearer, more enjoyable, and less fragmented, this persona became the central focus for shaping the product’s features and experience.
