Helping group travelers coordinate and plan a trip.
Client: Project for graduate level cert from UCLA Extension
Role: Researcher and Designer
Software: Sketch and Invision
Product: Mobile IOS
Timeline: 8 weeks
Have you ever gone on a trip or vacation with a group of friends? Of course, everyone has! They create lasting memories and help to strengthen friendships. Taking those trips are great... planning those trips will destroy your friendships. This platform is aiming at creating a buffer for you and your friends during that phase of the trip. It’s all done through transparency, organization and convenience. We want to streamline the group travel planning process.
Travelers often feel frustrated with the planning process of traveling within a group and would like a way to plan the trip together as a group but face no easy way to currently do so.
The goal during this phase is to better understand the user, the problem they face and to empathize
Right now there’s no easy way to plan a trip. Most travelers will have to use multiple resources and platforms to plan a group trip. This ends up leaving some travelers in the dark, one or two doing the bulk of the planning and the rest feel left out or take advantage.
After conducting a survey with 15 participants from the target audience we were able to hone down the main frustrations and thus the feature list to those above. Each feature was carefully decided to help address each of the main frustrations found within group travel.
The goal during this phase is to use the knowledge gained from the previous phase to create a usable user profile and begin to draft the flow and feeling of the product
Using a persona is crucial during the beginning stages of design. You need to set yourself in your target audiences shoes to truly empathize with them. Here we have Jason who is a 35 year old male with a type A personality. He wants to take a trip with his friends but feels like he’s the only one who really cares.
A value proposition and business model board were created to help actualize the main frustrations and services that can be offered. This will help keep a focused design strategy moving forward.
During this phase we are able to put pen to paper so to speak. We are going to start creating low fidelity prototypes, making decisions on Information architecture, iconography, color and typography. Then progress to mid and finally high fidelity mockups. All while validating and testing through user feedback and user testing. Making sure to pivot when necessary.
After compiling the main designs through paper, I set out to create an interactive prototype fully built out for user testing. My main goals were to keep it clean and simple with a decent amount of white space and a logical flow of design. I wanted to anticipate and provide the user with the tools they needed to succeed in their main goal in a logical Gutenberg fashion .
During this phase we are striving for a polished version of the app itself, something that we can take to a stakeholder or final user testing for validation.
