ToGather: a group travel app for Gen Z
ROLE
UI Design
Prototyping
User Testing
TEAM
6 Designers
TIMEFRAME
Oct. 2025 – May 2026
6 months
TOOLS
Figma
THE CHALLENGE
"The trip made it out of the group chat"
Travel planning is stressful, but with your friends… even more so
In 2023, one phrase captured that entire experience perfectly — 'the trip finally made it out of the group chat.' It went viral because everyone related to it.
People weren't just excited about booking a trip; they were celebrating surviving the planning. That reaction is what started this idea.
SOLUTION PREVIEW
Introducing ToGather
A group travel planning app where everyone pitches ideas, votes on what stays, and the itinerary builds itself
OUR AUDIENCE
Why Gen Z?
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They travel the most with friends
31% of people age 18–24 prefer to travel with friends—compared to the 10%–17% of those in their late twenties and beyond
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Opinionated
But Gen Z is bad at voicing it when actual decisions need to be made
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Collaborative and experience-driven
Saving TikToks of destinations months before a trip, creating moodboards on Pinterest
THE RESEARCH
We talked to people who'd planned trips, people who've been dragged along, and people whose trips never happened
12 interviews and 50+ surveys. Here are our key insights
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
So what are people using to plan group trips currently?
Existing apps treat collaboration as an add-on, not the core
Apps like Wanderlog and Pogo come closest, but collaboration is added on, not built in. Google Docs and Excel are being used the most, but has no travel-specific features.
A feature competitor matrix
Everything else solves a specific piece — expenses, bookings, itineraries — but nothing brings the group together from the start.
THE INITIAL DESIGN
From insights to features—solutions for all pain points designed into one app
We turned insights into opportunities and mapped nearly every pain point into a feature
It was essentially a group-travel focused Wanderlog — collaborative, with voting, comments, and memory capturing built in. But it assumed your ideas were already somewhere organized, jumping straight into itinerary building.
Our initial idea with 6 major features, all feeling disconnected…
I pushed for user testing and it quickly became clear the design, while comprehensive, didn't land. That pushed me to ask: are we solving the right problem?
THE PIVOT
We were solving the wrong moment
We'd been designing for the middle of the planning process and completely skipping the beginning
Planning doesn't start with building an itinerary. It starts with scattered TikTok saves, buried messages, and one person guessing what everyone wants because nobody actually said it out loud.
We went back to what we heard in interviews, mapped the actual system, and redesigned around that first moment — which meant starting with the ideas, not the itinerary.
THE SOLUTION
A shared space for everyone's ideas, a way to surface what the group actually wants, and an itinerary that builds itself
Plan together with the idea board
Everyone adds their ideas to a shared board before anyone starts planning. Restaurants, hikes, neighborhoods — anything
Make decisions together with voting
Everyone votes on the ideas in the board: must go, nice to go, and pass. Once voted, options will be categorized in the idea board through a points system, which will later be integrated into itinerary suggestions
Build an itinerary together
Drop in your destinations and trip length, and ToGather builds a starter itinerary from what your group actually chose — drag, drop, remove, adjust until it feels right. Flights, hotels, and activities all live in one day-by-day view, updating live for everyone
Can't agree? Let's split
The split feature lets subgroups easily break off into parallel activities and then regroup later. We want to make a flexible itinerary that works for everyone
The group trip wrapped
After the trip, ToGather recaps everything — the cities you hit, who voted the most (and who definitely didn't), and a personality type that captures exactly how you showed up for the trip
REFLECTION
Won Best User Experience Design out of 7 projects🏆
At the Design for America showcase, our project was selected as Best User Experience Design among seven teams, judged and voted on by four industry professionals. We were encouraged to ship the project!
Takeaways
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The importance of craft, the small details, and storytelling
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Always pushing myself to learn something new—experimented with motion in the post-trip blend and I loved it!