UXDI Project 1: Sia’s Travel Solution — Sprint 1

I worked with Sia, General Assembly student in London, to rapidly redesign a paper prototype for an app to help her find and meet like-minded people who can provide her with a truly authentic experience when travelling to foreign countries.

Client

Sia, General Assembly student

Project Duration

3 days

Techniques Used

Interview, concept map, storyboard, user flow, competitor analysis, participatory design, interactive screen flows, rapid prototyping, paper prototype, clickable prototype

My Challenge

Sia enjoys travelling often with her boyfriend, regularly taking weekend breaks to European cities and longer trips to more exotic locations across the world. Together they seek to find places off the beaten track and like to experience life as a ‘local’.

However, they struggle to find these immersive experiences when they don’t have friends living there who can show them around. Sia has concerns about trust and common interests if she were to meet up with a random local person she does not know to show her around.

Main Objectives

Design a way for Sia to find people:

• Who live in her travel destination
• She can trust
• Have shared interests

Sprint 1: My Approach

I used a User Centred Design approach to analyse the problem presented by my client and design an original solution that would meet her objectives.

Part 1: Explore the root cause of the problem

I felt it was important to start by having an informal chat with Sia in order to get a real sense for who she is and what’s important to her.

Mapping out the themes from our discussion revealed some of the key issues Sia finds when she travels and allowed me to narrow down the area I wanted to explore further with her. So I went back to talk to her again in order to delve deeper in my questioning and get to the heart of the problem:

1. She books a holiday
2. Researches places to go and things to do online
3. When she gets there she finds big crowds of tourists
4. She goes home feeling disappointed having not had a true authentic experience

Part 2: Existing solutions and competitor analysis

Next, I wanted to find out why existing solutions were not satisfying Sia’s needs…

• Facebook: You can search for people with mutual friends but not by location; also the people you find might not be interested in helping you
• Meet-up: You can meet people with common interests but they are strangers and this app is only good for attending events/talks, not experiencing life as a local
• Lonely Planet: This guide gives you ideas for places to visit and things to do but often, once featured in the guidebook, they get overrun with tourists
• Tripadvisor: Same issue as Lonely Planet

Part 3: Participatory design

I sat down with Sia again to explore how her problem might be solved in an ideal world. This helped me to start thinking about how an app might function. I proposed the main features, the user journey and screen flow to Sia and asked for her feedback.

Main features: Search for people in a specific location; view profiles; message people; suggest contacts based on number of mutual friends, shared interests and common events.

Feedback:

“I like that I can search for and message people but I want to be able to ‘save’ them so I can message them later”

Part 4: Paper prototype and testing

I refined my design to incorporate the suggestions from Sia and started drawing up low-fidelity wireframes so Sia could envision how the screens might look. I then asked Sia to test my paper prototype to see if it was working as she expected.

“How do I get to the next page?” Sia, client

I also approached a couple of other potential users who had not been involved in the design in order to see what issues they might uncover.

“Why does the toolbar change when I move to another page?” Luis, lecturer

“I’m not sure what page I’m on” Juliette, friend

Part 5: Clickable prototype and testing

Taking the feedback on board, I could see that some of the icons needed changing so I used Noun Project to help me design icons more in line with convention. I also redesigned the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to ensure it was consistent across all pages to avoid confusion.

I used POP to create a clickable prototype and again, asked Sia and a couple of other potential users to test my app.

“What if I’m travelling to several places? How do I group contacts by location” Sia, client

“When I click on someones profile, how do I know where they are?” Zoe, teaching assistant

“Is there a sort function? I want to order contacts by number of common interests” Nizami, lecturer

You can view my clickable prototype here

Sprint 1: Impact and Results

I delivered a well researched and tested clickable prototype within the allocated timeframe. However, the feedback from the users has given me a number of points which I would like to address in future sprints:

• Introduce a ‘sort’ feature
• Add the ability to ‘group’ contacts by location
• When viewing a profile, include the person’s location

Sprint 2

You can check out second sprint of this project where I worked on the visual design.

Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think in the comments!

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