Travel App — Enabling local people in remote areas.
Its 5 in the evening and we already know what we are doing for the 24 hour designathon. When Bolt was announced, I had specifically looked out for people in the design team with specific skill sets and who travel. We set out to make a travel product. We ask ourselves 1 big question —
“Can travelers really help the local community in the places they travel across?”
Lets find out!
Rama is working without blinking, with a big smile on his face and ofcourse a continuous stream of words coming out of his mouth.
Sayanee parses some of those words and responds often. Both of them are working on the visuals directly.
Rahul is still half excited about what we’re making and half about the logo he made for Bolt making it to the first page, first row on Dribbble.
At the heart of travel product
Travel products like tripadvisor, WeAreHolidays, makemytrip, etc. cater to a specific part of the organised travel scene. There is defenitely money in it. But what about the more enthusiastic travelers who find it hard to feel at peace in those sunset points where there is a sea of people taking selfies before making it to the next “spot”.
Airbnb lets you experience local lodging with a local host. How about staying in a local’s house in a remote village where you are up for trekking the next morning? So we want to talk experiences, not just places. The 12 hour Rajmachi Trek in the monsoon this weekend, where you won’t mind a local guide from one of the villages you’d cross. The 36 km rafting in Rishikesh, where again you’d most likely want a raft guide.
All these people as of now have been employed by some adventure travel company and we goto their offices in these places or book online. A nominal share of the money goes to the employed set of locals. At best, we find homestays instead of hotels to stay in.
Why not let travelers list down these people, their numbers ,etc. just like how it works in the real world — references. They could be hosts, guides, cooks.
At the heart of Interaction Design
We arrive at the name compass and try out an interaction around it.
Maybe we could twist the phone around and see places in the direction we want? Maybe we could discover new places?
Discovery is generally an open affair, we don’t expect like we do while searching and at times we don’t even have an idea of whats going to come up. However, we might have this one parameter which may render things useful or useless. In our case we figured it was the distance of these experiences from our location. If you’re looking at weekend travel you may or may not be cool with experiences which are 500kms away.
A long press on the compass in the center increases the radius through which experiences are scanned. The radius jumps through the rings and feedsback the distance on top of the rings and an increase in the number of cards. A double tap bring it back to the minimum.
Compass — Everything put together
Click on the screen to play with the prototype!
It lets you discover unique experiences around and a chance to travel with new people, mingle with and in process, most importantly — enable the local people. As a more seasoned traveler or adventure expert you could host expriences. The experiences are rated by the ones taking it. To enable the locals, travelers can simply list locals as guides, hosts or cooks.
PS: If you’re a travel enthusiast + techie and would like to build this with us, give me a shout at joshigrv@gmail.com :)
PPS: Also checkout some real neat IxD by our fellow Team Westeros here
