Case Study: The Tailored Traveling App

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” — Anthony Bourdain
Today, we are living in a high pace, fast moving society where one must slow down in order to keep up. Traveling shouldn’t be a leisure activity one takes to reboot themselves. It should be part of the norm. The issue individuals face today isn’t that they don’t want to travel, it’s because they don’t know how to travel.
Traveling isn’t just throwing a few clothes in a bag and a few traveling gear into a backpack and off you go. You need proper planning, budgeting skills, knowing where to go and how to get there, what to do in case of an emergency, and above all, to make the best out of the trip by experiencing things that pertain to you.
Research Discussion: Brainstorm what we want, who we want to target

The starting line for my team (which consist of two other teammates and myself) was to brainstorm everything we want in a traveling app. This allowed us to be be creative in coming up with new ways our traveling app can be different from the dozen of other apps. But also retain what makes an app a traveling app. At first we wanted to target a niche group of travelers that we called “The Explorer”. The Explorer travels on a whim and money wasn’t an option.

We further expanded our research by downloading and trying out other traveling apps. A key feature began to emerge, to have an interest based traveling app . The idea of having an app that makes the most out of your vacation by selecting places to do, things to see, and where to eat based on what your interest are. Another feature we wanted to add was to have our app house information such as personal documents, airline, and hotel so the user can access them quickly without opening other apps of going through their emails.

To make it as a legit app, we needed to conduct surveys that allowed us to understand the current market and see who travels and the pros and cons of traveling. I came up with a few types of questions that ranged from; How often do you travel? What do you do before you travel and when you get to your destination? Have you or currently using a traveling app? What features would you like to have on your traveling app? The responses we gathered allowed us to have a clear and direct path to take when my team starts creating the app.
Persona and Empathy Mapping: A clear goal

Setting up an Empathy Map along with Persona helped my team and myself maintain the course and to not deviate from the overall goal of our app. We chose someone like Henrietta cause she speaks to most of our common users.
- Travel more than once a year.
- Makes a budget
- Wants to travel abroad but fear of visiting a foreign place
- Complications of transportation
- Overwhelmed with options and hard to gather information.
With our Persona, I can always go back to it and use it as a guide that will hopefully keep me on the correct path.
Story Mapping and User Flow: traveling through our app

Going all out and adding the bells and whistles would make this app the ideal app I would love to show to my users. But with all projects, comes time constraints. Having a minimal viable product was the goal and trying to make our app functional with the least tasks proved to be a beast of its own. There was a lot of back and forth with my team on seeing what makes sense to our users to have and also what would make our app stand out. Trying to balance the two was quiet the experience but in the end, my team was able to pull together and have a solid ground to start our foundation on.

A flow that makes sense to the user and doesn’t allow for second guessing, and is straight to the point on where we want to take our user was our next task. The flow diagram also gave us a sense of if we need to add more flows or take away and simplify ones that seemed to complex.
Low Fidelity Wireframe and User Testing: Piece by piece


I always look forward building wireframes. There were no emphasis on colors, pictures, and even the typography and copyrighting. It was the ideal way to see how the app was coming together. How each piece will fit like a puzzle but also how they build upon each other like Lego’s.
I was able to create the on-boarding section of our app. To me, the On-boarding section is the most critical. It acts as a liaison between the app and the user. To ensure value, trust, and ease of use when using the app. During the On-boarding process, we have a small summary of what the app brings to the user.
After putting together our Low Fidelity wireframe, my teammates and I took our app and uploaded it to InVision so we can link the pages together that allows a more dynamic flow.
User testing at the Low Fidelity phase is critical and essential when designing an app. The feedback I got enabled me to see holes was an eye opener and let me see holes that were missing. We needed to let our users know security was our top priority when using our app and also to only allow them to enter in their interest and skip everything else.
High Fidelity: Prototyping and Testing





The app needed to feel as if you are actually visiting that destination when you are traveling. By having images that actually show what you want to see instead of reading it, vibrant colors to easily guide your eyes where you want to go. With each swipe and click is one step closer to your final destination.
Since we already uploaded the Low Fidelity sketch work to InVision and linked the pages together, all we had to do was update InVision with the High Fidelity work, link the new pieces together, and boom done! With all of the heavy lifting already done with the Low Fidelity, I was able to quickly test our app on InVision and also add some finishing touches to the Sketch pieces.
Conclusion: Plans for the future

Throughout the entirety of creating the app, I knew that my team and I were making a working product. A product that has the potential to become a legit contender in the traveling app market. We had passion behind every decision, every wireframe, every color, and every word. Working with a team that shares that passion made everything exciting but also there were a lot of back and forth because of the excitement. Even though as a team, this project came to an end, I shall continue on this journey. By continuing where my team left off, I would like to add additional features such as:
- Sharing your past trips to others.
- To dynamically schedule your day plans by using personal data.
- Allow more Interest based options to expand your choices.
