The Prototype!
Project Overview
Objective:
Our Goal here at TravelGram is to foster a faster, more meaningful experience when researching for vacations. We want to ensure only relevant content is shown to our users. That it is trustworthy content and that the content is meaningful.
My Role Duration The Team Type of Work
UX Design 2.5 weeks Myself Write-up
Research Lalita Desouza
Usability Tester Ely Wolfe
Wireframing Rachel Kamelhar
The Challenge: People researching vacations are overwhelmed by business-driven information. Travelers want a way to find first-hand accounts for recommendations on a trip. How might we connect users with first-hand accounts to address their traveling needs?
The Solution: To help travelers streamline their research process to find information that he can trust and that fits his travel needs?
RESEARCH
We started with our screen surveys to find our ideal participants.
User Interviews “Best recommendations came from friends and family." P
"Would have been hard to find without a recommendation.
The place was smaller and could not gather enough information online. So family recommendation was helpful.”
Key Insights:
Local’s opinions: Users prioritize the experience of a local over guides and other travel resources.
Users enjoy recommendations that are based on a person knowing their likes or dislikes.
Talking and interacting with locals is really important the user.
Users value a personal experience more than an advertisement.
Users reported a distrust of business-driven resources.
PERSONAS
Problem Statement:
Gary likes to conduct thorough research before he travels. He wants to maximize the time he has on his trip but wastes too much time sifting through useless information.
How might we help Gary streamline his research process to find information that he can trust and that fits his travel needs?
IDEATION
We did a design studio to get our creative juices flowing, finding solutions to the problem we are trying to solve.
During the ideation phase, we focused on how each design fit Gary’s needs. We ensured our success in this process by conducting a process called feature prioritization. This process enabled us to tailor our application features to our ideal user and led us to a design of our minimal viable product (MVP).
Using the MoSCoW method we listed all potential features. As a research team, we then divided the list into 4 categories in order of prioritization; must have, should have, could have, won’t have.
A user flow is used to show all possible paths that a user may take to accomplish their task. We created this user flow to show how Gary and Sarah’s paths differ when completing the same task. While Gary looked at his friends pictures, Sarah chose to look for a locals picks.
We created this user journey to show Gary’s passage through TravelGram. We are hoping to give you more insight on the emotions that he is experiencing from the time he starts researching for his trip to Costa Rica up until the time he is actually in Costa Rica.
THE SOLUTION
We completed two rounds of usability testing. In our first round, we tested 5 users on a paper prototype. In our second round, we tested 6 users on a mid-fidelity prototype.
Usability Testing Rounds and Results
1. The airplane symbol was found to be a source of confusion, therefore we decided to change it to a bookmark symbol to keep it consistent throughout the app.
2. We changed “friends” and “recent” to “Friends Posts” and “People You May Know.”
3. Users want the option to see how the locals live,
4. Users were confused by "Recent" so we changed it to "People You May Know"
5. Users want the ability to view results based on their friends
This shows our Local Ambassador program. A user can contact someone who lives in the area they are visiting and can see their favorite spots.
Next Steps
Pending approval, our team will pitch the application to Instagram April 1st.
Our marketing team will identify what users value as motivation for our “Local Ambassador” program by May 1st.
Our development team will code the essential features in the by June 1st.
The design team will test the mobile application by June 7th.
Link to clickable prototype: https://invis.io/H2G1KVKQ9GU
What did I learn:
This was our first project where we presented to "stakeholders". Some of their main feedback was that we made to many assumptions. Assumptions around the issue of trust, assumptions around IOS having better advantages over Andriod, and whether or not IOS users would accept privacy features. These were all things that I had not thought about before and was really helpful for me moving forward. When you assume you make an ass of U and Me. I'm sure I'll learn this lesson again at some point.