I decided the best way to research my competitors was to see what other travel apps people liked. I found this list of the ‘Best Travel Apps 2021’ on Tom’s Guide:
https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/round-up/best-travel-apps#xenforo-comments-462096
I realised a lot of these apps focused on planning trips or booking different aspects of travel. Upon further reflection I realised that this is sort of the expected direction to take for a travel app and I didn’t want to create a clone of something that already existed. So at this point, I decided to move more towards helping with the budgeting and planning aspect of the app.
I knew that with the time provided and the brief being 6 screens, I couldn’t fan out the entire idea but decided to go with it. I started looking for apps with similar purposes to get inspiration.
https://toomanyadapters.com/best-packing-apps/
I found this article which showed me a collection of popular packing apps for travel. Knowing this sort of idea has been done before, I decided this would maybe be the better option to focus on the budgeting portion of the app to challenge myself more.
I wanted to focus on the aspect of budgeting for meals when travelling as this is what I also struggle with when travelling. When going somewhere new, it can be difficult to predict what you’re going to spend on eating out. Tourists are often unaware that the most popular areas to eat are usually the most expensive.
I initially undertook far too much in my first design steps and created something far too big that really outweighed the requirements of the task.