What challenges do multi-generational travelers experience?

To understand the needs of multi-generational trip planners, we conducted interviews with three different generations from a family : a grandparent (age 66), a parent (age 43), a teenager (age 17).

These conversations helped reveal differences in tech comfort, engagement levels, and planning expectations across multiple age groups.

Tools & Interface Preferences

Prefer tangible, familiar tools like paper maps

Prefers tools that are efficient and functional

Prefers interactive and playful tools

Users across generations have different levels of digital comfort
Design needs a multi-modal interface that supports analog inputs like physical maps, and digital augmentations

Motivations & Emotional Needs

Seeks clarity, comfort, and simplicity

Wants a clear structure, efficiency, and fairness

Crave engagement, expression, and agency

Users are motivated by clarity, control, and emotional connection
Design should communicate clearly while allowing room for play and personalization—combining functional structure with emotional touchpoints

Level of Involvement in Planning

Feels excluded due to technical barriers

Overwhelmed by responsibility overload

Passive or disengaged due to uninviting formats

Current digital planning methods exclude or overload users
Design must support collaborative, balanced participation, making each person feel included

Openness to New Technology

Don’t want to use AR, but can participate with help

Willing to try if it is practical and simple

Enthusiastic about immersive, fun technology

AR is accepted if it is accessible and enhances shared experience
Design should use AR as a bridge—enabling generational cooperation rather than requiring equal technical skills

What does trip planning look like across our users?

Using the insights from our interviews, we created three user personas that represent each generation in the family. These personas helped us more deeply understand how each age group feels about travel planning.

Mr.Kim 67

Pain Points

Feels overwhelmed and confused with trip apps
Often feels left out of planning conversations when digital

Needs

A simple way to engage in the planning stage
Visual, intuitive tools that don’t require tech fluency

Mina 42

Pain Points

Feels overwhelmed of taking responsibility of all the trip planning
Finds it hard to keep others involved

Needs

A way to share planning responsibility
A tool that makes it easier to receive input without constant follow-ups

Jisoo 15

Pain Points

Planning tools feel too adult or boring
Doesn’t feel included unless the format is visual and interactive

Needs

Engaging, fun, visual tools like AR
A way to express opinions easily without long discussions

With these personas, we mapped out their journeys to clearly see how their experiences compare and overlap, giving us a clearer view of what trip planning looks like across our users.

Early planning stages often lack inclusivity, leaving some family members unsure how to participate
All users rely on simple, tangible visuals to stay engaged and understand travel options
Research becomes overwhelming due to scattered tabs, maps, chats, and tools
Groups struggle to make decisions fairly, often resulting in one person carrying the responsibility
Communication gaps across platforms cause important details to get lost or repeated
Emotional experiences range widely—from excited and curious to overwhelmed, passive, or left out—depending on the clarity of the process

Why bring physical maps into a digital planning experience?

During our interviews, we learned that older generations often prefer analog tools because digital interfaces can feel overwhelming. This insight led us to explore how a physical map can support a more inclusive, multi-generational planning experience. Not only did our interview insights point to this, but several studies also show that physical maps provide a stable, full-view anchor that better supports spatial memory, orientation, and collaborative problem-solving than digital screens alone. Physical maps enable natural gestures—pointing, drawing, placing objects—that keep people engaged and make the experience feel more personal and memorable. By integrating the strengths of physical interaction with the precision of digital data, we aimed to create a planning process that feels intuitive, shared, and accessible to everyone at the table.

What does AR technology look like now, and how is it advancing?

Before designing our new travel planning experience, we researched what AR glasses can do today and how the technology is advancing. We looked at future AR trends to imagine how AR could become more adaptive, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into physical spaces — and to understand how our experience might evolve over time.

Current

Future

Spatial layout design starts to blend in with physical space

UI will always be present, but not invasive with spatial layout

Capable of basic hand gestures, eye & head tracking, and simple voice commands

Multimodal inputs like emerging AI assistance and context-aware UI will adapt to environments

Capable of inside-out tracking of surroundings for simple movements and gestures

UI may move by user behaviors or environmental cues from full-body positional tracking

Still has a limited field of view of 50-70 degrees or less

Field of view will extend with immersive overlays

How did early prototyping and user testing shape our flow?

We started off by quickly exploring the structure of our AR travel-planning experience with low-fidelity paper prototypes, which allowed us to map out interactions, test layout ideas, and visualize how users may navigate between physical and digital touch points.

Explore Bookmarks

Reserve Airbnb

Plan Travel Route

After exploring with paper prototypes, we tested our paper prototypes with a few users to understand how they interpreted each step of the planning experience. Using these insights, we structured our screen flow to outline the key stages of the AR planning process.

Users struggled to understand the physical gestures and interactions during the bookmarking and planning stages
Users did not know where to start when exploring because they do not know anything about the area they are exploring
Older participants wanted fewer screens and clear instructions
Participants liked how the screen flow went from exploring bookmarks, reserving stays, and then planning route, which was the flow they were familiar with when planning for trips
System lacked a way of saving the travel route from this system to another platform for the users to view

What is the final system outcome?

An immersive planning system that combines a physical map with an AR interface—allowing groups to explore destinations, compare options, visualize Airbnb location data, and move through each planning step together—to create a clear, collaborative, and accessible experience for multi-generational travelers.

Scan Physical Map

Connect and Start Planning

Simply scan the QR code on the physical map to connect with the AR interface, enabling multiple users to join the travel-planning session.

Explore Area

Learn About the Destination

Quickly look through different areas within the city shown on the physical map, along with the system’s featured places to visit and key details that help users learn about each neighborhood.

Save Bookmarks

Find and Collect Places of Interest

Collaboratively add places each with priority preferences into a shared list, giving every group member a voice in what matters and making it easier to compare options and make informed decisions together.

Reserve Stay

Browse and Select Airbnb Stay

Easily review Airbnb stay options with details—including pricing, amenities, and an immersive AR view of the space—to help the group understand each stay more clearly and choose one that fits their needs.

Plan Trip Route

Map Out Detailed Travel Path

Collectively build a detailed travel path by arranging activities, stays, and points of interest, gaining a clear understanding of how each stop fits into the group’s overall trip sequence and daily flow.

How is information visualized within the bookmarks?

To make bookmarked places easy to understand at a glance, we visualized key details—such as location name, category, user color, and priority preference—in a clean, structured layout. We focused on making each 3D category icon visually connect with the corresponding 2D icon for users to make a clear connection between the pins both on the mini map and the physical map.