Parindey
Go Solo, Because YOLO
Project by: Amanjaiswal, Davis Chris, Ayush Shah, Nirali Shah
The amazing journey of “Parindey” started from a series of tasks given to us by our Professor. The tasks consisted of different brainstorming activities that helped us think more clearly with different perspectives. Later on, we were divided in 7 groups, and each group got to choose an industry of their interest. Being very enthusiastic about the tourism industry, our group was keen on exploring it further.
After creating a detailed mind map of the same, the topic realised by us was, Solo Traveling.
Traveling alone is the scariest, most liberating and a life changing experience of our life. As we travel solo, we become totally responsible for ourselves, and it’s inevitable that we will discover just how capable we are! It helps us understand who we really are.
“Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe tobe ekla cholo re” — Rabindranath Tagore
(If there is no one responding to your call, then go on all alone.)
We adopted the EDIPT design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, in our countries, and even on the scale of our planet.
Structured according to the 5 stages of the Design Thinking Framework (E-mpathise, D-efine, I-deate, P-rototype, T-est). In the first part of this article we’re presenting the case study, following which, in the second part we’re highlighting some of our executions. All in a chronological order.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
We commenced our project by conducting in depth Secondary Research. We first formed a Trend Matrix that focused on Social, Political, Economic, Competitive, Technological, Regulative and Market based research of the Solo Travel Industry. After watching bundles of videos, tuning in to bulks of podcasts, studying various blogs, articles, reviews etc.
Some of the interesting facts realised were:
HYPOTHESES
To dive in deeper and get a better understanding of the solo travel industry, we finalised 5 key hypotheses out of 15 that mainly focused on Psychological, Planning, Culture, Exploration and Market based themes.
CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH PLAN & PRIMARY RESEARCH
We came up with a detailed research plan to validate our hypotheses. The plan focused on figuring out the areas of exploration and finalising the sources that we wanted to interview. We managed to get in touch with a diverse category of solo travellers, travel agencies, marketing agencies, travel app designers and psychologists. After having one on one conversations with each one of them, our level of understanding the situation expanded ten fold. A lot of interesting inferences emerged.
INFERENCES
Our key inferences focused on the following themes:
- Planning: Some people like to plan their trip in advance, while some prefer keeping it spontaneous. Travellers also find it difficult to maintain a balance between overpacking and under-packing.
- Psychology: People travel solo to disconnect from their daily monotony in order to reconnect with their soul. Post solo travel, people evolve & grow mentally & create a paradigm shift in their perspective towards life.
- Challenges: Solo travel can sometimes lead to lonely nights and situations like “mann nahi lagta akele khaane me’ come up.
- Experiences: A good portion of solo travellers keep adventure sports an integral part of their travel.
- Market: Indian solo travellers prefer ‘sasti masti’ while exploiting their long weekends to the fullest.
INSIGHTS
After multiple interpretations and iterations, we emerged with 4 key insights that summed up our entire research and paved the way for solutioning.
FINAL HOW MIGHT WE’S
We came up with the following problem statements that targeted specific areas that hadn’t been worked on in the industry.
OLD JOURNEY MAP
To understand each and every step of a solo traveler’s experience, we built a journey map. This journey map was extremely detailed and was the longest that we had ever created. In spite of being away due to the COVID situation, we managed to develop an understanding with our terms of working and were able to par all the complications. After completing this journey map, we truly felt a sense of accomplishment and gave ourselves a tap on the back!
IDEA BUCKETS
We came up with a long list of ideas after multiple brainstorming sessions. We definitely felt drained, but were equally satisfied with the outcome and were excited to see how our solution would turn out.
SERVICE BLUEPRINT
The service blueprint was a tool completely new to us as a team and it took us a while to get the actual hang of it. We got better with every phase, used it as a weapon to target our problem statements, identify all the services we offered, and fix the loopholes within them. Since the journey map and service blueprint were closely related, we did a second round of constrained ideation on the different stages of the journey map to gain clarity on our solutions. After fixating on all the customer actions and their touch points, we filled in the front stage actions to draw the line of visibility. As we went beyond that we dug deep to fill in the back stage actions and support systems.
SOLUTION
The concept of travel challenges with regards to exploration, and developing connections with other travellers/ locals stuck to us and seemed like an interesting space to be in. It directly addressed our problem statements, by introducing planned yet spontaneous, adventure activities, that enable a solo traveler to explore a culture in a deeper way, in the given time span. We addressed the budget issue and made it easier to plan more extensively by easing the discovering and booking process.
Parindey suggests travel locations based on your intent or interests, streamlined bookings, curated challenges that let you explore the unexplored and shows you other fellow travellers and local citizens based on your travel interests.
Celebrate the true spirit of solo travel and adventure by taking the road less taken.
STORYBOARD
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
At this stage we defined the structure of how the user will navigate through the whole app, keeping in mind the following things:
- We wanted the app to be easy and simple for the user to navigate through.
- We wanted Parindey to be “the” place where a user could find all his data without having to search around too much.
LOGO & CONCEPT
COLOR PALETTE & TYPOGRAPHY
We picked the colour yellow because it is the colour we start our day with. Being bright and positive, yellow is the colour of warmth and welcome and it creates a sense of being grounded yet adventurous, calm yet fun. We picked yellow as our primary colour and black and tonal greys as the secondary colour.
Inter as a font has been on the radar of our designers for a very long time. It is a variable font created by a wonderful bunch of people. It is a craft at its creation and we thought our project did justice to its wild spirit and sense of freedom. We picked 4 weights of the font to have a dynamic range to show hierarchy, while conveying the information well.
WIREFRAMES
We wanted the wireframes to be as detailed as possible so that we wouldn’t get confused while designing the User Interface (Since we were all working remotely because of the pandemic). The wireframes went through several stages of iterations until the flow seemed desirable.
UI
The fact that we had long discussions and jams on the wireframes helped us a lot when it came to designing the final UI. We designed everything from ground up, making sure every element and card follows a cohesive design language and fits perfectly into the different flows. The colour yellow made it easy to maintain balance in the UI, while different tones of grey kept the texts neutral. We steered away from complicated interactions and stuck to the simple, generic yet fun tabs and navigation to make sure the user spends more time travelling and less time on the phone.
Onboarding
Plan Travel
Explore Challenges
Partner up
PROTOTYPE:
We prototyped simultaneously, as the UI design furthered. This helped us in ensuring, every bit of visual information was perfectly sized keeping the screen in mind, to reduce scrolls and give the information to the user at one shot. We used the software we love, Adobe XD to both design and prototype all our screens.
MARKETING POSTERS:
We came up with two marketing posters. One focused on exploring unexplored places, while the other focused on building connections with other travelers and localites.
LEARNINGS
The COVID situation helped us discover different ways to make this project work. We were amazed by how we were able to adapt to the change. The time constraints taught us how to plan and organise our project more efficiently.
WHAT’S NEXT ?
The next step would be to test the prototype, and do as many rounds of iteration as possible, followed by developing the back end processes of the app.
