A travel app that helps adventurers find unique experiences that suit their budget and lifestyle.
UX Designer
UI Designer
3 Months (Dec. 2019)
Sketch
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
InVision
Proto.io
The task was to create an app that provides information and recommendations to travelers to experience different cities around the world to their fullest potential.
While my design process is always well thought out and planned in advance, it is very rarely a linear process. In this case, there were numerous iterations and changes that needed to be made throughout.
I was given a specific challenge, but to fully understand the problem, I needed to do some more research.
One of my research goals was to understand current user frustrations while traveling. Putting out surveys helped me better understand how Bon Voyage could help users.
I wanted to interview 3 participants to get more in-depth knowledge on how users currently travel. This also helped tell a story about the data that I collected from the online surveys.
After learning a bit more about my users, I was ready to make sense of the data I collected.
I decided to do an affinity map made up of quotes, goals, frustrations, and data gathered in my research. I then combined them into different user issues that I discovered.
Budget Friendly: Users prioritize budgeting and finances when booking their trips.
Personalized: Users want to see information that is specific and appropriate for them
Local Experiences: Users prefer activities over leisure, and generally want to adventure off the beaten path
Collaboration: Users need to be able to communicate and collaborate with other travelers
Personal Necessities: Dietary restrictions and safety are both primary concerns for users
"Eating local foods and experiencing unique attractions are the main reasons why I love to travel!"
• Cost-effective travel
• Personalization
• Local Experiences
• Collaboration
• Inaccurate travel information
• Lack of flexible dining options
• Wasted time while traveling
Travelers need a way to quickly and accurately find unique activities while traveling with others, because inaccurate information is frustrating, and very common in the current marketplace.
To start brainstorming, I felt that “6-8-5 sketching” would be most beneficial. In order to get as many ideas onto the page as I possibly could, I decided to sketch between 6 and 8 screens on a folded piece of computer paper. Since I was limited to 5 minutes, it forced me to focus less on quality and perfection, and more on getting ideas onto paper. I did the exercise 3 times.
After putting some ideas on paper, I needed to start planning out user flows that would make sense for this product.
Now that I had a solid idea of what I needed to do, I needed to start creating wireframes that I could test before moving on to high fidelity designs.
Users were seeking a way to plan trips easier and more quickly. By adding personalization options, suggestions will help streamline the planning process.
By including an onboarding process, it gives the product the information it needs in order to make these suggestions.
Since user lifestyles change, it was also important to allow changes to initial preferences that they selected during onboarding.
During the initial user testing, I found that travelers really value local experiences that are hidden from the majority of tourists.
To solve this user need, I added the ability for city locals to become a certified expert on a given city. This allows travelers to get suggestions from people that know the city as well as anyone.
Users were looking for a way to collaborate on trips with other travelers, so I decided to add a chat feature within the application.
I added a vote option, because many users claimed that their biggest issue with coordination was choosing daily activities.
Users will be able to view live results, and change their own votes. Voting bias can help groups come to consensus decisions better, so it was important to allow vote changing in this case.
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In order to understand the effectiveness of my initial design, I needed to test it with users.
I was able to test the initial wireframes with 4 individuals that were experienced travelers and would provide valuable insight.
Users gave me really helpful feedback on the wireframes, and ended up saving me time working on high fidelity screens that weren't effective.
I took the feedback that I received from users and made the appropriate iterations.
The onboarding flow tested relatively well, but many users selected almost all of the available options on the Activities screen.
I decided to add a "Select All" feature which would allow users to simply deselect the one or two activities they don't enjoy.
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I found that most users wanted more information about local guides, and would opt to message them to gain more information.
To accomodate the large amount of messages and compensate local guides, I decided a token system would be helpful.
Purchasing tokens to initiate chats will incentivize more local experts to offer advice, and limit the number of incoming messages.
I initially designed screens that would allow users to chat and vote within the app. Through testing, I found that users didn't care about the ability to chat within the app.
The ability to vote was well received by users, so I decided to keep this feature without the messaging.
Messaging screens will still need to be buil.
Bon Voyage was ready to be dressed up with visual design. I would have loved to do another round of testing to learn about my iterations on the wireframes, but due to time restraints I needed to get working on the high fidelity designs right away.
I found that one of the primary concerns for users was to save time where possible. One of the easiest ways to do this was by creating a simple, yet effective onboarding.
By storing valuable information about user preferences, Bon Voyage can offer suggestions to users later.
It was important to keep the flow short enough not to lose users attention, so I decided to find the 3 most valuable preferences of users based off of my research: favorite activities, transportation preferences, and budget.
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In-app purchases will be one of the primary revenue streams for Bon Voyage, so it was extremely important to provide value to users that were interested in contacting local guides with tokens that they purchased.
In order to connect users with the right guides, I created a filter that will allow users to find exactly the right person to show them a foreign city.
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I wanted to make sure that Bon Voyage would maintain high ethical standards, so I wanted to add some friction in the messaging process to avoid accidental use of tokens.
After opting to message a local guide, users will need to confirm that they are willing to spend tokens that they purchased prior to reaching out.
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I started this project off with a ton of exciting ideas for features that I could include. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of time early in the process stuffing features into the product that ultimately were not appealing to users. This was especially true while designing a chat feature that ended up not making it to the high fidelity design stage.
I also learned that the most profitable features within a product are the ones that naturally fit the product, and don't create additional hurdles for users. The token system ended up helping local guides by limiting incoming messages, and it turned out to be a revenue stream for Bon Voyage.