Trip Planners: Paper Prototype

Paper prototype for collaborative app on smart watches on mobile devices for trip planning and navigation.

DESIGN

This paired app, Trip Planner, is designed to solve the problem when people feel that smartphone is too troublesome for navigation. Especially when people are touring around the city, walking on the streets, or biking, using a smartphone for navigation can be quite inconvenient.

With this paired app, users will use their smartphone app to manage their destinations, the places they are interested in, and view the places they have visited. While the navigation functionality relies more on the smartwatch app, where users can select a destination from their list of destinations they created with the mobile app, and the smartwatch app will direct users to their destination. The smartwatch app also have a “tour” mode, where it shows the places users are interested in around their current location. For example, if users add “museum” as their place of interest, under the tour mode, the app will show the museums near users, and users can select the place to navigate if they want. The smartwatch app can provide more personalize touring experience by notifying users what are the places they might be interested in depending on the time and location. For example, if the users add “restaurant” to their interests list, when it is about the dining time, the app will notify users with dining choices near them. With all these functionality, Trip Planner will ideally be a more convenient and personalized navigation and touring tool.

PROTOTYPE

In order to test this app concept, I created paper prototypes for both smartphone and smartwatch apps. I also created specific elements that later were used in the user testing.

Smartphone App

The smartphone app basically has five main screens, including home, search a place, manage destinations, manage interests and visited places.

HOME screen includes four buttons lined to other four screens with a sync button on the navigation bar in order to sync data with the smartwatch.

SEARCH A PLACE screen allows users to type the place they would like to add their destinations. As users type in place in the search box, the interface shows locations with distance information that users are likely looking for.

MANAGE DESTINATIONS allows users to view the destinations they have added and delete the destination if they want.

MANAGE INTERESTS allows user to add their interested places and delete added interested places.

When users want to add their interested places, they will be directed to ADD INTERESTS screen to search and add.

VISITED PLACES allows users to view the places they have visited by chronological order.

Smartwatch App

The smartwatch app includes two modes and one sync data button as the main functions.

HOME screen includes three buttons for each function.

DIRECT MODE asks users to select a destination from their destination list to start the navigation.

NAVIGATION interfaces give users directions they need to go and show the location of their set destination when they arrive.

TOUR mode allows users to browse the places they are interested in near their current location. The type of places users are interested in will be gathered from the smartphone data. From the tour mode, users can select a place and set it as the destination for the navigation.

EVALUATE

Because of the weather, the testing of actual navigation function was not able to conduct in real scenario. Hence, I had to verbally describe the path to the user, and the testing of the navigation part was not quite effective. In general, for the given tasks, the user was able to figure how to complete the task by herself without more specific prompt. The functionality of both apps worked well for the user and the interfaces were quite intuitive for the user. However, I could not conclude if the navigation interfaces were effective or not as the testing was conducting inside.

Also, the user suggest for the navigation part, besides pointing the direction, it would also be useful to show the distance and the time along that direction on the interface. User suggested connecting to Yelp or other touring website for more information when they want to learn more information about a specific place. During the testing, I also noticed that some details on the interfaces were missing, for example, there is not a specific label for the search bar input, and the reason user didn’t find that confusing was merely because that was the only thing she thought she could work with on that specific interface. The user did think navigating with smartwatch would be more convenient for her and the personalized touring experience was helpful with this paired app.

DEMO