An upcoming trip to the airport, and you have a million things to take care of. Tickets, bags, medicines, phones, chargers, closing all doors and windows, the list goes on…On top of that you have to worry about traffic, when to start, how much to pay for parking. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to reduce stress at this critical time?
Waybud was born out of this need to help the hapless traveler navigate the journey to the airport. The businessman, the frazzled mom of twins, grandma and grandpa, who have a hard time running from place to place, all have the need for a simple easy to use app that will make the decision for them. The journey towards making the Waybud app started with simple need-finding missions. I interviewed a young tech-savvy traveler, an analyst, and a creative professional who were traveling to the airport under entirely different circumstances. They shared various scenarios of analysis paralysis, not starting early enough and not accounting for transit times which caused them anxiety in the end.
I went broad and brainstormed and came up with a lot of silly and not so silly ideas. I went broad first and then converged, narrowing down to a couple of options I wanted to explore. Then I started storyboarding based on my research so far. I drew my first prototypes on paper and Waybud started taking shape. After 2 more revisions of the prototype on paper, I was ready to go digital.
First came grayscale wireframes, and then a full-fledged prototype on Invision. I reached out to 2 users with an initial prototype and asked for feedback. Amazing insights were shared during this process and design changes were made to account for these new insights. The last step was to create a version A and a version B with the changes so that I could test it with randomized user testing.
I found the user testing done through Usertesting.com to be most rewarding. Seeing someone interact with your creation and follow the familiar path to success was very rewarding. All the users that tested my prototype were very detailed with their thoughts and shared rare tips that I would have never thought of myself. I am deeply appreciative and thankful of their contribution. I am very proud of this journey that I took for my interactive app ‘Waybud’. I hope to build on it someday and make it available to the general public and help them reduce stress at critical times.
