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After a user provides the initial information for the trip in the “Planit” page, the user is taken to the “Map” page. This provides the visual of the trip using Google Maps. Here the user may intermediate stops by clicking "Add Intermediate Stop" as well as see what are the possible hosts in a location when they click the accordion menu for each location under the “Host Options” panel. In this panel, a user may remove the stop or “Send a request” for each person within a stop. Initially we had just a map with “pins” for each stop and a user would have to click on a pin to see which hosts were available in the city. From the paper-prototype testing, this was a poor design choice because user testers became confused as to how select hosts. Hence, we iterated to providing a panel that “kept the map clean” and providing a constantly visual widget that allowed for host selection. Also before, there was a huge inconsistancy between the previous pages and these pages. The backgrounds, buttons, etc. were different between these two sets. This became known to us as an ‘issue’ during the Heuristic Evaluation. On the left of this page we provide a “Navigation” Panel which allows the user to see all bits and pieces of the trip they are currently planning or editing.
The user’s next step is the “Requests” page which can be accessed by either the Navigation Panel or the by clicking on “Send a Request” to a host in the “Host Options” panel on the Map Page. Once here, the user can select hosts in each city to message using the same method in the “Map” page by selecting people from the “Contacts” panel. Users did not seem to have issues with this page.
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