TripUp - Group Travel App
TripUp is a mobile app designed to make group travel seamless, from planning and real-time decisions to shared expenses and memories.
UX/UI Designer
B2C Mobile App
2026
Goals & Objectives
Datamorf Webapp
What is TripUp?
TripUp is an all-in-one group travel companion that lets friends collaboratively build itineraries, vote on decisions, track and settle shared expenses, and document their trip together. Designed for the chaos of real group travel, spontaneous decisions, shared ownership, and zero tolerance for friction.
My role
This project was completed as part of a design interview test. I was responsible for the full UX and UI of the app from scratch: information architecture, wireflows, interaction logic, and three hi-fi screens. The brief provided user research, personas, and a core user scenario to design around.
Key objectives:
Design a group travel experience that reduces friction to near zero at every decision point
Establish a clear role system between organisers, participants and guests
Create a poll flow fast enough to compete with WhatsApp as the default group decision tool
Design an expense and settlement flow that handles splitting, multi-currency and in-app payment
Research
Datamorf Webapp
The brief provided rich user insights that directly shaped every design decision. The primary users split into two profiles: the Organiser, who sets up the trip and keeps things moving, and the Participant, who wants to stay involved without being overwhelmed.
Three behaviour patterns defined the design constraints:
Spontaneous decision-making: most group choices happen on the fly and the app must support real-time interaction
Shared ownership: everyone wants input, particularly on food, activities and expenses
Low tolerance for friction: if something takes more than a couple of taps, users switch to WhatsApp
Beyond the brief, I conducted a competitive analysis across three categories: group travel management apps, poll and voting tools, and expense splitting apps. I looked at what interaction patterns were working, where the friction was, and what UX conventions were worth carrying forward versus challenging. This informed both the feature set and the specific design decisions made throughout the project.
Iterations
Datamorf Webapp
The overview problem
Most travel apps that offer a trip overview fail at it: cluttered with loosely related information, no clear hierarchy, nothing actionable. Most users skip past it entirely. I kept the overview but redesigned it as a real dashboard: next activity, group balance, announcements, and a visit wishlist. All actionable, all relevant to where the user is right now.
Adding the Guest role
The brief defined two roles: Organiser and Participant. I added a third, Guest, to solve a real scenario in the brief itself. Ren joins only for the final dinner. Giving Ren full participant access to the entire trip, including documents, accommodation details, and the full expense history, felt both unnecessary and invasive. So the Guest role limits access to the specific event they are assigned to, nothing more.
In-app payments and the TripUp Wallet
Most expense tools like Tricount or Splitwise stop short of actual payment: you mark as paid, then settle outside the app. I closed that loop with direct in-app payments, positioned as a Pro feature given the cost of card transactions. This also introduced the TripUp Wallet: incoming payments stay in-app and can be reused to settle future balances, creating a natural incentive to stay within the ecosystem without locking users in.
Final Design
Datamorf Webapp
The wireflow
The final deliverable includes a 15-frame annotated wireflow covering the three core flows, with inline annotations for non-obvious interactions and scenario context below each frame. The architecture prioritises low-tap access to every critical action (polls, expenses, and group management) through a centralised quick-add modal accessible from the bottom navigation.
Three hi-fi screens
Three screens were taken to high fidelity to demonstrate the visual direction: the Trip Overview, the Voting screen, and the Itinerary view. The UI uses a warm off-white background, bold photography, and orange as the accent colour reserved for active states, CTAs and leading vote indicators. Typography is clean and confident, designed to work at high information density without feeling cluttered.
Reflection
If I were to continue developing TripUp, I would focus on usability testing the poll flow specifically, as it is the most friction-sensitive feature in the app. The two-type poll system needs real user validation to confirm the distinction is intuitive and that the smart defaults are reducing friction rather than creating new confusion.
I would also invest more deeply in the packing list, the document vault, and the activity wishlist, all added beyond the scope of the brief. The claim system in the packing list, the access logic in the vault, and the connection between the wishlist and the poll flow all have interaction complexity that a wireframe can only begin to answer. All three features extend TripUp's value beyond the trip itself: before it starts and in the planning leading up to it.
A natural next step would be designing a trip journal feature: a shared space to upload photos per day and activity, exportable as a keepsake. It wasn't part of this project but represents a real opportunity to give TripUp an emotional dimension that utility-focused competitors lack. Post-trip engagement is where long-term retention is won, and the journal is the feature most likely to bring users back.