Reimagining travel planning on Google Search

In a 10-week summer sprint, we gave Google Search a way to plan trips, not just answer queries. The framework fed into the 2024 Search roadmap.

Role: UX Engineer
Duration: Summer 2024
Team: 3 UX Designers, 1 UX Researcher, 1 Product Manager
Skills: Interaction Design, Prototyping, Concept Exploration, Research Synthesis

10 weekssummer design sprint

4 designersone team, one shared framework

3 stagesof trip planning, mapped into one framework

Problem: Most travellers start without a destination, and Search treated every visit as new.
What I did: Owned the third stage, Rediscover the journey, and pulled all three stages into one connected prototype.
Outcome: UX leadership validated the framework, and it fed into the 2024 Search roadmap.

Overview

Search was built for one query. Trip planning takes weeks. In a 10-week summer design sprint at Google, a team of four designed a planning framework for Search that UX leadership validated, and it fed into the 2024 Search roadmap.

Problem

Most travellers start without a destination. Search treated every visit as new, with nothing to spark ideas, compare options or remember where you were, so people patched it together with tabs and screenshots.

Day 1

Day 3

Day 8

Day 12

Day 17

Day 21

Day 26

Day 30

Day 34

Search today: every visit starts from zero.

Illustration — One trip, 34 days. Every visit starts from zero.

Goal

Help travellers go from “I want to go somewhere” to a booked trip, across weeks of searching, without starting over.

Solution

Add password to keep reading.