EnviRoamer: A Product Development Case Study
Indonesia is a wonderful country with diverse culture and breathtaking natural beauty to explore, which should be preserved by everyone. As travelers, we seek to enjoy the stunning views as well as create core memories to remember.
However, have you ever wondered what we give back to the environment as a result of our trips?
Environmental Impact of Traveling
“Travel & Tourism emissions are estimated to range from 8%-11% of global greenhouse gas emissions (3.9 to 5.4 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions out of a total of 48.9b tCO2e in 2019)…”
— World Travel & Tourism Council in November 2021
In fact, there are several environmental impacts caused by traveling such as air pollution, land or space use, habitat loss, and noise pollution. Consequently, these impacts contribute to climate change, poor air quality, health problems, biodiversity loss, and degradation of ecosystems.
Can Travelers Make Their Contribution?
In refers to the 2023 Sustainable Travel Report by Booking.com, 76% out of 33.000 travelers are looking to do traveling in a sustainable way over the next 12 months. After spent significant time on research, we found out that some travelers interest in doing sustainable travel on their next trip but have problem in arranging the trip plan due to varies aspects in each travel destination that need to be considered.
Hence, our team decided to develop an iOS application to help travelers in planning their future trips. It helps them to find a destination based on their personal preference that enables them to elevate their eco-conscious practice while on vacation.
Problem Identification
User Interview & Analysis
Other than did online research, in-depth interviews were done to gathered data related to the travelers’ experiences about their eco-friendly practice while traveling.
Our team did in-depth interviews to five interviewees, where each session lasted roughly for 30–40 minutes. The interviewees are active travelers (do traveling at least 1–2 times in a year) who are aware with sustainable practice.
The following are the key insights gathered from the interview:
Based on our interview, most of users would say that they are driven to minimize negative environmental impacts in their life because they started to feel the degradation of environment and people become less aware of it. They also happened to get influence from movie or people around them. They feel like it would be better to be eco-conscious because it means you can share same idea and influence people to care more about environment too; especially in the natural and conservational sites. After several iterations, our team decide to scope in the problem into ecotourism part.
Deep Dive into the Situation 🐳
We tried to understand more how might the experience of the ideal users if they come across our application when they want to plan their trip. Hence, we created a visual story line of how the thorough condition will be faced by the user.
Problem Statement
We realized that there are several limitations which can not be controlled by travelers when they want to travel more sustainably, including lack of supportive infrastructure and options in certain destinations. However, it will be easier for travelers to make conscious choices on vacation if they do research ahead of time to find better way of traveling, offset their carbon footprint, or choose to travel to destination that supports eco-conscious traveling. Additionally, technology can maximize their needs by creating supporting tools for existing ideas.
As for that, the following is the problem that we tried to tackle:
How might we help travelers to plan their upcoming ecotourism trip?
So that they can find a suitable destination to elevate their eco-friendly practice while traveling
The following are the points that were selected to be the main focus of this project:
1. How might we help users to find curated information related to ecotourism destination, offset activities, and transportation that can support eco-conscious practice?
2. How might we help users to predict the total carbon footprint based on their travel preference?
3. How might we help users to organize information about the destinations as well as carbon prediction for the planned trip?
Feature Analysis
We did several in-depth feature analysis for iOS applications that focus on travel planning and calculating carbon emissions to got additional insights to develop our application. Below are two of them:
We were looking for supporting data of how could the feature in our app could help the users’ pain points. Doing this analysis help us to think what might be suitable parts to support the solution in our app.
Solution
EnviRoamer is an iOS app designed for travelers to elevate their ecotourism practice. Seamlessly plan the perfect trip with curated info and ecotourism recommendations at a fingertips. Effortlessly predict trip carbon emissions based on personal preference. Make informed choices for greener destinations and embrace a truly eco-friendly travel experience.
Features:
- Discover Ecotourism Destination — Get curated information about available eco-tourism places.
- Predict Carbon Emissions — Predict the total of carbon emissions based on user’s travel preferences.
- Organize Trips— Plan and organize trips.
Information Architecture
Information architecture was done to construct better understanding of the pages that should be included on the application:
Sketch Out the Idea
We tried to do the crazy 8 method to sketch out as well as did the mid fidelity to better visualize the initial design idea.
High-Fidelity
After several design iterations and usability testings, the following is the final hi-fidelity prototype of EnviRoamer:
Features:
- Discover Ecotourism Destination
Get curated information about available eco-tourism places which will be group by its province. It includes the information for transportation options and offset carbon activities that support eco-friendly practice.
2. Predict Carbon Emissions
Utilizing the input of desired destination, trip duration, transport mode, and accommodation type provided by users, the application will predict the total amount of carbon emissions for that arranged personal trip.
3. Organize Trips
Plan and organize adventures through a clean list view of scheduled trips, which display both upcoming and past trips. In addition, users will able to curate dream travels by saving desired destinations through wishlist.
Play the following video to preview EnviRoamer:
Give us a try!
The beta version of EnviRoamer is now available on TestFlight. Any feedback is welcomed to help the further development process 🤩!
Disclaimer:
The project is not fully developed, you might find bug(s) while testing.
Lesson learned
It was a tough yet amazing one month that we spent starting from the very scratch idea until we developed the app this far. We learned that we need to define and scope in the specific problem that we want to tackle to be able to form an useful solution. The process of problem identification is an iterative one, where initial research and interviews laid the foundation, but multiple iterations might be happened to accurately pinpoint the specific problem we aimed to address. Additionally, integrating concept testing and usability testing help a lot in order to form a user centered iOS application as it helps us to better understand how far the concept that we provided might help the users as well as usability rate. The data gathered from the testing will later be used to make adjustment to improve the app itself.
Meet the team!
Special shoutout to my fantastic teammates that brought this project into reality: Evelyn Theodora, Guspita Arfina, Tiyasaria, M Yogi Satriawan
