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Ace Adventura (Travel App)
2 weeks/sprints (2020)
Interact with the high-fidelity prototype (1 user flow) here
In the current era, people crave for unique and personalized experiences. So, people are engaged in crafting their trips end-to-end.
In every trip, every minute gets etched in an individual's mind as a sweet memory. Such travel, even after precise planning, comes with great deal of expected & unexpected uncertainties.
One solution to personalize every trip thematically? Introducing, Ace Adventura. Your personal secretary to a seamless & personalized travel.
UX Researcher & Information Architect
• Solo project (with multiple SMEs)
• Exploratory & tactical UX research
• Business research
• Design Sprints & rapid usability testing
user satisfaction score.
participant
tactical research.
instances of
errors & confusion.
In the current era (definitely before/after COVID-19), people crave for unique experiences in every trip. Every minute in the trip gets etched in an individual's mind as a sweet (or a bitter) memory. Such travel mostly comes with an 'expected-uncertainty'.
This joyous adventure takes a toll when it comes to planning for the trip. Countless options offered by different sources doesn't necessarily match the varied preferences.
Even though every information can come handy from multiple mobile apps / websites, users face a dire situation to choose and decide a comfortable trip wisely.
The room for improvement demanded an experience that can bring every possibility with a mobile app.
• Is there a possible way to choose a trip package based on location-based data immediately?
• And filter if the package includes everything (a place to stay, food, transportation, sight-seeing, adventures and many more)?
• What if this experience is made peer-to-peer (where anyone in the world can organize and anyone in the world can participate)?
The one solution for all your travel problems? Ace Adventura. Your personal secretary to a seamless travel.
• Design sprints
Tactical research (generative short-term):
• User interviews (Remote & In-person)
• Competitor analysis
• Business needs integration
• Requirements generation & Feature set
Synthesis:
• Participant sketches (NEW)
• User personas
• User journey map
• Information architecture
Creations:
• Rapid prototyping (Lo-Fi, Mid-fidelity & Hi-Fi)
Evaluative research:
• Tree test & information scent test (NEW)
• Usability heuristic evaluation
• Moderated usability testing (Remote & In-person)
• Adobe XD
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Comp
• Design system - Based on 'Material Design' guidelines
• Ease vacation planning and execution.
• Enhance peer-to-peer organized trips/adventures.
• UX designer & researcher (myself)
UX played a pivotal role in creating an experience strategy, researching users, designing prototypes & validating the interactable prototypes and iterating them.
The project was planned to cover four user journeys:
1. Browsing (trip planning) & Booking
2. Trip preparation
3. During trip
4. Post-trip
This project was stopped at the end of user's booking journey. The project was halted at the end of second sprint due to the downward spiral of travel industries due to COVID-19 situation.
Agile principles were followed in the design process. 5-day design sprints were followed to update deliverable.
Even though the design sprint is a non-linear process, for this study, I followed the same order as explained below.
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Why?
Raw qualitative data of 5 users from a representative population is worth more than 100 survey responses with random audience.
Results:
• High-quality qualitative data religiously collected from representative population facilitated user exploration and hit me with beautiful 'Ah-Ha moments'.
Who should I design for?
I needed a user base to focus and design. To find out the underlying needs an anonymous lightning survey form was conducted online. Out of the 21 responses collected, the top two user categories (with unique preferences) represented the ages 25-35 and 55-65.
Since the participants sampled were random and limited, I assumed that the results from the survey represents the targeted user base around the world.
This could be eliminated by conducting large-scale user research/referring a previously performed research data (most suitable for start-ups). Or, by analyzing the existing/prospective customer base (most suitable for established firms).
Participants for the interview:
5 participants volunteered for the interview. As per the ratio generated from the user survey, the selected participants fell under the following categories:
• 3 participants (25-35 year old)
• 2 participants (55-65 year old)
What type of interviews?
1. In-person user interviews
2. Remote video call user interviews
What was the focus?
Open ended questions to find:
• Reason for trips/travel
• Expected information
• Pain-points
• Goals, wants, needs & fear
Example questions:
"Tell me about a time when you booked for a trip through an app/website"
"Walk me through your thoughts on deciding on a travel plan"
"What are the red flags that you face while you travel?"
"How frequently would you travel and how many people do you travel with?"
"What apps/websites/technologies would you use to assist you in your journey?"
"What do you like about traveling?"
"What do you expect from a mobile app to help with you traveling?"
"What makes you travel?"
Next step, I needed personas to significantly represent the user base. These personas should be strong characters who collectively satisfies the needs and goals of majority of the user base.
Personas helped me to quickly build direct and indirect paths to values. So, the significance was humongous.
Why?
To understand:
- What already exists?
- What can we do better to stand out?
- What best practices can be continued?
Results:
• A big bunch of decision dependent questions to boost strategy.
• Market gaps where we can make a mark.
• List of analyzed competitors' strategies.
To predict the possible mistakes (to-be-avoided) and learn from the experienced the open source mediums provided by the direct & indirect competitors was referred.
Needless to say, the reviews of the competitors' products became a part of the core strategy. This measure enhanced scope of the customer experience (CX) in a short period of time.
A big mental block that has to be tackled is pre-conceptualization from competitor's products. To avoid this, when generating designs, the idea of our mission, vision and values of the product should be embedded in every component created.
This simple-yet-effective experience strategy breeds branding at the product's core.
Mission:
• Deliver the best, worry-free experiences for people going on trips/vacation.
Vision:
• To make the trips customer-centric and inclusive at every point for every human in the world.
Values:
• Easy, valuable, comfortable, desirable and sustainable.
• Provide the best experience for the selected personas.
• Find what could be given better than the industry leaders.
The room for improvement demanded an experience that can bring every possibility with a mobile app.
• Is there a possible way to choose a trip package based on location-based data immediately?
• And filter if the package includes everything (a place to stay, food, transportation, sight-seeing, adventures and many more)?
• What if this experience is made peer-to-peer (where anyone in the world can organize and anyone in the world can participate)?
Why?
Summarize findings and convert them into value-adding objectives.
Results:
• Identified internal and external needs.
• Created feature sets.
• Established success metrics.
Customer-centric:
• One app does all the fuss while traveling.
• Exclude transportation booking to the city of start (No airplanes/ships/trains/cars booking to the starting point of the themed tour is done via the app).
• Cover a large user base inclusive of several user categories.(Aim to satisfy even the lower end of the distribution)
• Compete against the giants by providing end-to-end travel solutions.
Team-centric:
• Developer friendly designs.
• Integrate third party APIs if necessary and if it doesn't affect the brand.
• Research deliverable iterated as updates through design sprints.
• Quick themes (Private/Public trips and Solo/Couple/Family trips).
• E-commerce inspired layout
Planned (not designed) features from other user flows:
• Instant messenger (private/group chats)
• Dashboard: Situation-based layouts
• Travel journal
Since there wasn't a team, I made use of the participants to sketch out their own ideas.
The reason this was more effective than colleague/team based sketches was because, the mental models of different unrelated personas gave way to broader perspectives to design from a satisfactory interface . The increased variability in users' expectations doesn't restrict the design but in turn give rise to multiple scenarios and conditions to solve for.
In turn, this helped me validate my hypotheses and assumptions about the users collected from the qualitative data collecting user research methods.
Why?
- To give life to the validated hypotheses.
- To address pain points and convey a story to the team.
- To target opportunities in a user's mental model.
Results:
• Integrated multiple user journeys .
• Devised strong experience strategies.
• Early steps towards defect prevention (as much as possible).
Why?
- Form a content strategy and identify language level, tone and depth of information.
- Provide a structure for the user flow.
- Make limited pathways easy and definite.
Results:
• Decision to include symbols (icons) as non-verbal communication.
• 100% success rate in the moderated tree test.
Why?
To quickly identify errors related to experience and human cognition limitations.
Results:
• Fixed the visibility of system status.
• Fed back issues to be fixed in visual hierarchy.
Why?
- To pin point error generating components, activities.
- Test the integration of the app in a natural environment
Results:
• Fixed a major accessibility issue.
• Preventive measure and design fixes for errors in the search filter.
Confusion was completely eliminated (zero confused moments) at all points and the final tests resulted in users achieving a continuous flow throughout the journey.
The designs backed by all cognitive principles and the feedback from repeated testing achieved this feat.
The user satisfaction scores achieved an average of ~8.7 for mid-fidelity prototype. The target for final prototypes was set to be 9. The mid-fidelity prototype passed the test because, the most recent tests were conducted with no visual styling (to eliminate the factor called: instantaneous desirability).
