QwestFriends is a travel app for planning your next group vacation. Avoid disappointments when you coordinate with your travel mates to build everyone's ideal trip. We've made collaborating interactive and fun!
MY ROLEs
Visual Design Lead,
UX/UI Designer
Conducted exploratory user interviews, wrote user survey, collaborated on research synthesis and persona creation, illustrated storyboard, sketched lo-fi wireframes, created mid-fi wireframes, conducted competitive analysis, conducted user testing, designed logo, created hi-fi prototype in Figma
Duration
4 weeks, April - May 2020
TEam
David Ciccocioppo, Arvin Figues
Tools
Miro, Whimsical, Figma, Illustrator, PhotoShop
Background
Did you ever go on a trip with a family or a group of friends and feel like you had everything planned, only to be frustrated with the inability to come to a consensus on activities, entertainment and dining options once you get to your destination? After some exploratory research to understand the modern traveler's pain points, we discovered that this is a common problem among those who otherwise feel very confident when it comes to planning the logistical details. What we heard is that travelers experienced disappointment and overall frustration when they had to deal with interpersonal problems and disagreements with their travel mates.
Objective
Design a mobile app that gives travel companions the ability to collaborate and come to consensus on entertainment and activities before and during their trip in a fun and interactive way.
Empathize/Research
We conducted exploratory qualitative and quantitative user research to understand the following:
• How travelers want to experience their trip
• A traveler’s journey when planning for a trip
• How technology is used by travelers during their trip
• What factors lead to an overall bad travel experience
Assumptions
The modern day traveler is aged 25-35, gainfully employed, and single with no children. Their frustrations are managing a good work-life balance and finding the best deals online.
The Pain Points
What we found was that people who prefer to travel with friends need an easy way to collaborate and plan prior to and during their trip because their companions will have very different wants and needs. They might not even know everyone in their group.
“It was an interpersonal thing. There was a plan that I had wanted to do and it ended up unraveling. So that was frustrating for me, being the planner.”
“I wish that we could have just been a little bit more upfront with one another saying like, we don't want to go or, this probably can't happen.”
“I'm a big fan of kind of having an itinerary and a plan. That way you know you can diverge from the path but, you can always get back on it.”
Our Persona
- Our user is roughly 10 years older than we originally assumed with 63% of our quantitative respondents identifying as female.
- We correctly assumed that our user travels to explore new destinations and make memories. Our user persona ultimately turned out to be more established in both her finances and relationship and also more of a deliberate planner than our initial proto personas.
- We generally assumed correctly that our user relies on technology for travel planning.
The Problem
We're developing a solution for people who travel with groups of friends. Our research shows these groups may have trouble collaborating ahead of time, which leads to arguments during their trip.
How might we give traveling companions an easy way to find common ground before their trip?
Ideation
After properly identifying our problem, we brainstormed ideas to find a solution. With the problem statement in mind, we posted multiple insights from our research into “I like, I wish, What if” statements and grouped them into related categories. We then voted on insights we deemed to be most important and plotted them in a feature prioritization matrix.
It made sense for us to develop a mobile appreciation to help our user meet her goals because we know she is tech savvy, busy with work and personal life, and social when she’s able. A mobile app’s portability, ability to sync with contacts, and push notifications in real time would give us the flexibility to design the features that will make our user successful.
The Solution
QwestFriends is a travel app for planning your next group vacation. Avoid disappointments when you coordinate with your travel mates to build everyone's ideal trip. We've made collaborating interactive and fun!
We came up with QwestFriends as a memorable name for our app.
- Qwest, or quest, implies a common or shared goal and sense of adventure and exploration.
- Color palette, typographic style, and arrow element implies fun and interactivity.
In order to bring our persona to life and to imagine her ideal scenario, we visualized her experience with QwestFriends using a storyboard and further clarified her UX scenario and opportunities in a Journey Map.
Prototyping
Following the story of our user and guided by our feature prioritization matrix, we designed a path that would allow her, the trip planner, to quickly onboard and begin suggesting activities to share with her friends. From there, she and her travel mates can continue to add activities, comment, opt-in or opt-out, and schedule a shared itinerary for their trip.
With our user flow as a guide, we quickly sketched out the on screen experience. We digitized these sketches, created a wire flow, and iterated the user flow and wire flows concurrently.
Once we ironed out both flows, we began wireframing and building a mid-fi prototype in Figma. Our intention was to build as complete of a clickable experience as possible for the purpose of testing. The main flow follows the path of Michelle, our user persona, as she downloads the app, sets up her trip, adds activities and invites travel mates to collaborate.
Testing
User testing was an eye-opening and humbling step that greatly informed our direction going forward. We learned in testing that we spent too much time and effort building a nearly full-functioning prototype rather than focusing on each individual task that we intended to test. The result was that 4 out of 5 of our testers had difficulty with a task at the heart of the entire experience.
Following user testing, we iterated several versions of the prototype to determine where we failed to make an intuitive experience right out of the gate. Pouring over the testing videos and contemplating the comments from our testers, we realized that we made a few key assumptions that needed to be addressed. Through rewording some of our UX writing, renaming a few key features, and making minor adjustments to the UI and flow, we feel we were able to accomplish the easy and fun experience we set out to create.
View High Fidelity Clickable Prototype
Takeaways
Continuing to be curious and dig deeper in our research gave us a better understanding of the user’s needs and goals beyond our personal bias and assumptions.
We know now not to let our eyes get bigger than our stomach in the definition and ideation phases. It’s easy to notice every little problem to solve, but it takes time, patience, and a lot of iterations to uncover the one big problem whose solution will have the greatest impact.
Fail fast in the prototyping phase. We learned to not rush into executing a fully functioning prototype. Instead, we should focus on the main feature and be sure that it delivers before moving to the next user task.
Test, test, test! It was easy to be swayed by our own bias and believe that our team’s ideas and designs were fail proof. What we realized was that it was more likely that we'd overlook a minor feature that could lead to a big problem with the overall experience. Getting several perspectives revealed that the user didn't follow our anticipated path.