Peter McPhail.
← All work
Travel · Mobile

Hosted: A culturally immersive travel planning app

An end-to-end concept app that matches travellers with local hosts so they can experience a destination the way locals actually live it.

User problem
Adventurous travellers struggle to find truly authentic, culturally immersive experiences when they travel.
My role
UX Designer & UX Researcher (research, ideation, prototyping, testing)

Overview & Problem

Travel planning that misses the point of travelling

Adventurous travellers don't want another itinerary stuffed with tourist traps. They want the food locals actually eat, the neighbourhoods locals actually live in, and the stories you only hear from someone who calls a place home — but today's planning tools optimise for bookings, not for culture.

Hosted is a culture-focused itinerary planning app that pairs travellers with a local host, so an entire trip can be designed around real, lived experience rather than a search engine's idea of "top things to do."

Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, InVision, Miro

Research

Listening before designing

I started with a single research question — How can we make travel planning easier? — and three objectives: understand what inspires people to travel, how they choose and plan trips, and where the planning process actually breaks down.

From there I built a proto-persona, ran user interviews, and synthesised the conversations into an affinity diagram, an empathy map, and a refined user persona.

Proto-persona I built before interviews to anchor recruiting and question design.
Interview plan — one research question, three objectives to keep every conversation focused.
Interview data grouped into Inspirations, Priorities, and Pain Points.
Empathy map capturing what users said, thought, did, and felt.
The persona I designed the rest of the project around.

Competitive Analysis

What the existing players actually solve for

I evaluated five major travel apps across four jobs travellers care about: itinerary planning, activities, food & restaurants, and lodging. The pattern was loud and consistent — every app could book a hotel or surface a generic "things to do" list, but none of them designed for cultural authenticity. Activities defaulted to tourist attractions, food defaulted to a Google search, and the human element was missing entirely.

Five competitors evaluated across itinerary planning, activities, food & restaurants, and lodging — the gap for culturally authentic planning is clear.

Definition & Ideation

The crossroads — and the insight I almost missed

My first user insight pointed at efficiency: young travellers wanted all their planning tools in one spot. It was true, but it wasn't the interesting truth. A round of follow-up interviews changed the direction of the entire project.

"Tourist activities are often overpriced and the food or experiences are not as good as they could have been." — Shiloh
"They're not as culturally centered — the places are interrupted as opposed to what they're meant to be." — Brittany

Both participants said the same thing in different words: they currently figure out culture by asking locals once they arrive. That reframed the problem entirely.

Final user insight

Young adventurous travellers don't discover culture through planning tools — they discover it by talking to locals after they land. They want that authenticity built into the trip before they leave, not left to chance once they arrive.

Problem statement

How might we give adventurous travellers access to local cultural knowledge before they arrive, so their entire itinerary is built around real lived experience rather than algorithmic "top 10" lists?

Value proposition

Hosted pairs every traveller with a local host who designs a culture-first itinerary — so you experience a destination the way locals actually live it, not the way search engines sell it.

Prototyping

From user flow to clickable prototype

With the problem reframed, I mapped a user scenario and storyboard, then worked from task flow → user flow → final user flow, focusing especially on the onboarding experience where travellers tell Hosted who they are and what they're looking for in a culture.

User scenario — the happy path from first open to meeting a local host.
Storyboard — Kendra's end-to-end experience with Hosted, from download to walking the streets of Paris with local recommendations.
Final user flow — the full app journey from first open through onboarding, matching with hosts, and building the itinerary.
Early paper sketches exploring the full flow — sign-up and onboarding, preference and destination selection, and the host / itinerary experience.
Lo-fi clickable prototype screens — the full onboarding-to-itinerary flow used for the first round of usability testing.
Digital wireframes (Adobe XD) — the refined onboarding and home flows before hi-fidelity visual design.

Testing & Iteration

Guerilla testing the onboarding

I ran guerilla usability tests focused on two objectives: could users complete onboarding, and could they add hobbies, destinations, and dislikes from the home screen?

  • All participants completed onboarding and added destinations, hobbies, and dislikes.
  • The drop-down menus caused some confusion and were simplified.
  • "Dislikes" felt off-putting as a label and was rephrased.
  • Users expected the "+" button to open a pop-up; behaviour was changed to match.
Digital prototype (Adobe XD) — splash, sign up, home, and dislikes screens with the post-testing iterations applied and the final visual language in place.

Takeaways

What I'd carry into the next project

  • Iterate on the insight, not just the UI. The shift from "planning is hard" to "culture is missing" was the single most valuable move in the project.
  • Test low-fi, early. Usability problems surfaced on paper and lo-fi screens are cheap to fix and expensive to ignore.
  • Spend the time where it changes the design. If I did it again I'd compress the competitive analysis and use that time for one more round of prototype iteration.