Case study: Tourism application for Taif City
Hello, Medium 🎈. I’m back with my third project from Misk academy’s UX design immersive course.
PROJECT BRIEF
Teammates: Malak Alqahtani 🪄| UI/UX, Rayan Mansour Alkathery, Ftoun Almutairi, Haneen Alghamdi.
Project Duration: 2 weeks.
Project Goal: To create a new user experience by designing a platform to meet users’ and clients’ needs in the tourism field.
ABOUT TAIF
LOCATION:
Taif city is located in Mecca Province in Saudi Arabia, it is considered a summer destination for many Saudis and tourists to enjoy the cool breeze and the breathtaking sights of mountains and valleys.
CITY OF ROSES:
Taif is known as the City of Roses because of the unique fragrant wildflowers that bloom in the valleys and mountains in the spring 🌺. It boasts a large number of rose farms and factories that make products such as perfumes, hand soaps, and oils, and more with a Taif rose distinct scent.
ATTRACTIONS:
Taif contains several beautiful attractions, one of the breathtaking attractions which took my attention personally is Alwahbah Crater, which is located 250 kilometers away from Taif.
For a long time, people assumed that this crater was created by a meteorite, but this has no scientific foundation due to lack of evidence, they didn’t find a trace for Shocked Quartz or high levels of iridium. The second assumption, people think that it was formed by volcanic activity in the form of an underground explosion, caused by hot lava colliding with subsurface water, resulting in a tremendous explosion that ejected the crater 🌋.
EMPATHIZE 👥
First, we conducted a survey to learn more about users and their travel experiences in general, including trips planning. In addition, their relationship with Taif, including how much they know about it, their visits, and how do they go to it.
Second, we were able to interview 20 users from the above 60 participants. Our main goals of these interviews were:
- To know what motivates them.
- To know the main pain points.
- To know their behaviors.
- To know their needs.
Following the collection of interviewee responses, we tried to synthesize them using affinity mapping, which yielded the following key insights:
BUSINESS RESEARCH
After we’ve completed our user research, it’s time to turn our attention to the business side in order to build a platform that will be valuable to our users. Based on our user research results, especially when users used cars while they were traveling to Taif, we believed that an application will suit them best, and this led us to choose related competitors.
C&C ANALYSIS:
Findings:
- Most of the competitors guide the users to explore the city’s activities, hotels, etc. By having explored page or things to do page.
- All of the competitors provide the location for each service, except Almosafer, which provides only for hotels.
- All the competitors provide ratings, reviews, filters, sorts, and images that reflect the importance of these features.
- All of the competitors provide the share feature except Expedia.
- All of the competitors don’t provide weather info to the city.
- The majority of the competitors provide contact information and opening hours.
- Only three out of seven competitors have interactive maps in their Applications.
- Roadtrippers and Expedia allow users to create a plan for their trip.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION (LEMER’s):
Findings:
- In terms of learnability, efficiency, memorability, and error management, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, and Booking are leading rivals. We will incorporate the best practices that we noticed from each competitor into our solution.
And finally, it is time to meet our main character Maha, which represents the targeted users.
MAHA’S PROBLEM
People who travel to Taif city by car are mostly facing difficulties in finding convenient hotels, restaurants, and activities to do when they plan their trip due to lack of information and tour guides services, and also they need ways to facilitate their road trips. They need to have a solution where they can have organized, happy and unforgettable trips and be able to discover Taif city’s landmarks nature and wildlife.
SO, WHAT MAY BE THE SOLUTION?
Our aim is to design a single mobile application that provides a comprehensive guide to explore and plan a trip to Taif, which will include information and recommendations with reviews of the available hotels, restaurants, places to go, and activities also the application will allow the user to book a hotel and create a plan for the trip. In addition, suggesting activities to do on their road trip.
HOW DOES MAHA REACH TO OUR SOLUTION?
THE JOURNEY OF MAHA IN THE CURRENT SITUATION
In Maha’s journey, we represented her feelings, thoughts, and actions in a scenario for her traveling to Taif in the current situation.
DESIGN 🎈
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION:
After we took a look at our competitors and our user’s needs in the research part, we decided which features are we going to have, then we prioritized them using MoSCoW method in order to build them in our application.
SITEMAP:
We did open card sorting on our targeted users to help us in creating a sitemap for our application, and we came up with this result.
Med-Fi WIRE FLOW:
MED-FI WIREFRAMES:
PROTOTYPE TESTING:
We tested our Med-Fi wireframes prototype on 13 users and had them complete four tasks:
- Try to explore one of the attractions and see where is it located, also add it to your favorite list and view your favorites list.
- Try to create an itinerary and add one place to it.
- Try to explore the road, and read about wildlife sanctuaries.
- Try to book a hotel.
After we tested the prototype we discovered that:
- Most users were confused by the word “Itineraries” while they want to create a new plan.
- Users were confused by these two different interfaces because they share the same button design and illustrations.
- Most users were confused by the flow of creating and adding places/activities to the plan, thus we conducted an AB test to see which of these two flows works best. As we expected, flow B wins because it has fewer clicks and less duration.
SYSTEM DESIGN:
FINAL PROTOTYPE
THE JOURNEY OF MAHA AFTER OUR SOLUTION
We represented Maha’s feelings, thoughts, and actions in a scenario for her traveling to Taif, and as you can see, our solution was able to reflect Maha’s thoughts, and she is now feeling satisfied.
NEXT STEPS
For our next steps we want to:
- Performing usability testing on the Hi-Fi wireframes, and enhance them.
- Adding share plans and places feature.
- Adding suggestions feature for a pre-planned trip.
CONCLUSION
Finally, this is my third project in this course, and it has been an amazing experience that allowed me to expand my knowledge. I’ve learned an important lesson for me as a UX designer, we must look at what users actually do, rather than what they prefer or wish to do.
I’m so proud of what I and my group did, and I’m so grateful for our lovely instructors for helping and guiding us.
Looking forward to the next projects!
Thank you 🌺🎈✨
