Project Summary
Role
Team
Duration
Tools
Method
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UX/UI Designer and Researcher
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5 Members
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3 Months
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Figma
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Goal Directed Design
Introduction
TravelMate is a mobile prototype designed to assist individuals in planning trips personalized to their desires. The current travel app market fails to address the majority of personal needs of travelers. TravelMate solves this issue by allowing users to act as their own travel agents to plan their trips in one app. Through extensive research, we have implemented key features tailored to meet the needs of users utilizing travel apps. Throughout this process, I served as a team member, working alongside 4 other team members to research and develop solutions to the current downsides of the travel app market.
Research Phase
For the first week of the research phase, my team organized a kickoff meeting to understand the challenges surrounding travel planning, alongside understanding how our product will behave in comparison to our competition. Each team member contributed their insights regarding the types of users that would use this app, what they may look for in an app like TravelMate, and what we needed to explore to assist in user needs.
Next, I was tasked with researching the market of current travel planning apps by conducting a literature review and competitive audit. Our findings included a lack of solutions for the organization and planning process of trips. I also identified complaints of inaccurate information when trying to build itineraries in apps in the current market. Additionally, I was able to realize that some travelers are spontaneous and don’t plan trips like others. These findings made the competitive audit and lit review important to the process by allowing us to hone in on how we can find solutions to these findings
To conclude the research phase, we conducted five virtual interviews. Each team member had the opportunity to lead an interview and record notes about each interview. After each interview, we collaborated our insights into an affinity map. These affinity maps assisted in identifying consistent patterns from each interview. These patterns included an emphasis on budgeting, safety, social media influence, transportation, and efficient travel planning. We utilized these insights to shape our user personas for the Modeling phase.
Modeling Phase
During the modeling phase, our team targeted common behaviors and trends from the conducted interviews. Some interviewees had unique preferences and behaviors, which made the process a bit challenging to narrow into a persona. As we collaborated our findings, we noticed similar behaviors to assist in building a primary and secondary person. Our primary persona was an inexperienced travel planner in the younger demographic. On the other hand, our secondary persona was a more experienced traveler.
Requirements Phase
With various ideas for our app, our team was challenged to narrow down which features to include. Our team conducted a meeting and brainstormed our features to go with our persona expectations. Aligning these features with our persona was challenging considering we had so many ideas and key findings from the interviews. During this phase, we began to feel slightly overwhelmed by our features considering the time given to complete our project. However, we ended up aligning our features with our persona and continuing with the confidence that we could get it done.
Furthermore, the insights from our persona expectations enabled us to build a context scenario showcasing how our primary user would interact with our app. This context scenario was similar to a short story on what actions our persona would likely take when navigating through our app. During one of our meetings, a team member recommended the idea of an AI feature to help build the itinerary for a user. Not only did this idea fit perfectly for both personas, but this allowed us to improve the personalization and efficiency aspect that our users desire.
Frameworks
The Frameworks phase was a fast-paced one week development of wireframes and key/validation paths for our app. The key path showed the pathway our primary persona would likely take. On the other hand, the validation path showed the path our secondary persona would likely take when navigating. Because we had so many features, we divided the work evenly among our team. I was assigned to focus primarily on the onboarding and account pages of the app. I created wireframes and key/validation scenarios for my assigned sections and collaborated on these scenarios with my fellow team members. In addition, this phase allowed us to realize that we could realistically implement the features we were originally overwhelmed by during the requirements phase.
Refinement
The refinement phase was the final phase of our process. We conducted 2 usability tests to gather insights on how we could improve the user experience of our app. Our group leader was the moderator for these tests, and I took notes on feedback given by the users. Our users gave us mostly positive feedback on the color scheme and features implemented. On the other hand, we received recommendations to include back buttons on specific pages to improve the navigation process. In addition, we did some final touches on the navigation bar and overall design before it was ready for our final capstone showcase.
Conclusion
Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome of our app. One of the major lessons I learned throughout this project is that so much can be done quickly when a team does its part. Originally, I was concerned that we had too many ideas we wanted implemented into our design and would have to cut down. However, our team worked hard and efficiently and we got everything done without needing to rush. One thing I want to improve on after this project is team participation. There were moments throughout the process when meetings would get dull and quiet. I believe I could have solved this by asking questions that could get the team more involved and get ideas flowing to make the process smoother.