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The sign-in/sign-up page was was supposed to convey a concise “Introduction” to our site. We chose to have both the sign-in and the sign-up on the same page because, in our research, the act of having to go to a new page to either sign-in or sign-up was not favored by user testers. The decision we ultimately went with - both on the same page - was favored by user testers.
(Home page to signin/signup)
When a user signed-in or signed-up, we wanted to provide a “User Home Page” which presented him or her with all previous trips and the ability to create new ones. We wanted a centralized directory of all trips which became the Dashboard. With no trips planned, we have by default a message indicating so and an arrow indicating how to plan a trip. Just having the black box with no message was confusing to our users so we added that message. If there are trips in the dashboard, a user may click on the accordion header to see a thumbnail map of the trip, some important information about the trip (dates, places, etc) and the ability to “Remove” the trip or “View” and edit the trip. We wanted to provide the user with the ability to do anything with the previously planned trips. Initially, we had the “Plan a New Trip” button a little below the dashboard box and we found out that this button was sometimes off the screen (the user would have to scroll down). This was made clear to us during the Heuristic Evaluation and we made sure to fix this error in later iterations.
(Empty Dashboard with instructions to Plan a New Trip)
( (Top) and a Dashboard with a trip already made (bottom)).
The user may plan a trip by pressing the “Plan a New Trip” button on the Dashboard page. This will take the user to the Planning Page where the user inputs his or her desired trip. We allow the users to title the trips themselves and the rest of the form we wanted to keep consistency with airline forms because “recognition is easier than recall.” We also wanted to add the ability for a “Round Trip.” We added this by adding a “NOTE” on the top of the page, informing users instructions for a round trip to give them the ability to do so. 
(The Plannit box to plan trips)
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