PROJECT INTRO & OUTCOME

We designed a mobile app WeTravel which helps business leisure travelers to connect with each other and explore local experience. The ultimate goal is to help build long-term relationships among professionals.

Time Oct 2015 - Dec 2015

My Role As the only UX designer on the team, I created user scenario, user journey map, and use cases. I also conducted 2 design iterations with low-fi and hi-fi prototypes.

background

“Bleisure travelers" are professionals who are shunning the all-work-and-no-fun grind of business trips by mixing them with vacation time. As our client, International Travel Corporation, a new specialty travel agency, hope to provide a strong digital presence to attract bleisure travelers.

To help our client, we identified the following goals for our design project:

Usability: Allow bleisure travelers to easily achieve their goals. Make it easy for them to identify where a specific type of content is. Enable them to interact with the app in an intuitive way.
Business Growth: Attract more customers and drive user engagement and customer loyalty with ITC.
Sustained Relationship: Provide more than just one mobile app to the customers. Build a sustained relationship with individual travelers and local communities.

The Problem

There were two main problems we aimed to solve for bleisure travelers:

Feel lonely or bored: For bleisure travelers who travel alone, they have no idea what to do or who to be with after walking out from the office building.
Not familiar with the city: They want to spend quality time with their family or friends, but they have no idea which place is fun or which restaurant is good.

To solve the above problems, a mobile app enabling bleisure travelers to connect with each other and explore the city together will be good. We chose mobile phone app because it's more accessible during traveling than laptops or tablets.

User Research

Online surveys were sent towards 100 professionals. Face-to-face interviews were conducted towards 5 professionals.

Are you interested in connecting? why?

50% of the participants are interested in connecting with other bleisure travelers.

The major motivation is to build a long-term business relationship (71.43%).

What factors do you consider while connecting?

While connecting with other bleisure travelers, they will consider factors including occupation (64.29%), gender (57.14%), age (57.14%), schedule (42.86%) and other travelers' motivation for connection (42.86%).

What are you interested in exploring?

100% of participants are interested in exploring local activities or experience, including food (85.71%), sightseeing (78.57%) and local events (71.43%).

what factors do you consider while exploring?

While looking for local activities and experience, they will consider time spent (92.86%), location (85.71%), cost (64.29%) and content (57.14%).

User Persona

User Scenario

We created storyboards to picture user scenarios. The left one is about how Emily connected with another bleisure traveler through WeTravel and explored Seattle's restaurants together. The right one is about how Jon explored kids-friendly places in Seattle through WeTravel.

User Journey map

Based on user scenarios, we divided the user journey into 5 stages from gaining awareness to achieving their goals. We created a user journey map of Emily who was interested in both connecting and exploring. The aim is to investigate how users' cognitive and emotional changes through different stages.

The challenge and USER EXPERIENCE GOALs

The user journey map reflects that at some points of interaction, even small defects could hurt user experience. Thus, we have determined user experience goals that could prevent us from ignoring key issues and ending up with bad UX.

Safety: Since users will connect with other travelers and have some social activities, safety is an important concern. Users don't want to connect with a stranger who might hurt them. Thus, it's imperative to design good verification process.
Efficiency: Time is an important concern during traveling. Bleisure travelers usually have tight schedules. While they want to connect or explore, they might only have one hour available or even less. Thus, we should make the process of connection and exploration efficient without wasting users' time.

Use cases

According to user research, the main needs bleisure travelers have are connecting with other travelers and exploring local experience. Thus, connection and exploration are the two main use cases. In order to connecting with others, profile, message and notification are necessary.

Those are the 5 main categories of use cases, as shown in the right table.

design iteration 1 & user test

Prototype during 1st round of design iteration

During the 1st design iteration, we created low-fidelity prototype and tested it towards 3 target users. Through user test, we found issues including:

User onboarding steps were tedious, and it required too much user input. It made users feel frustrated.
The hamburger menu had discoverability issue, users were not able to navigate to certain page.
The "travel profile" required too much work for users to create.

Design iteration 2

main design challenge

How to match the bleisure travelers with people they are interested in connecting with, or places they are interested in exploring?

1. User on boarding

Based on user research, travelers considered occupation and motivations while connecting with other travelers. To simplify the on boarding process, we allowed users to sign up through LinkedIn, so that the app can automatically get the users' occupation information. It also helps to verify the users.

2. connection

According to the user research findings, the ultimate goal of connection is to maintain long-term relationships. Users can go through multiple steps/interactions to achieve it.

2.1 DESIGN CONSIDERATION - SHOULD WE MATCH PEOPLE BY THEIR AVAILABILITY?

"Availability" is the date, time and place that users are available to meet. The availability needs to be provided by users themselves. The reason of having availability is to increase the success rate of getting connected. If the available time of two travelers doesn't match, they won't be able to hang out together.

Though there are alternative solutions, they are no better than letting users provide availability by themselves.

2.2 Connecting - related hi-fidelity prototype

Set up available meeting time, in order to better match two travelers.

Send connection request to Mike, and start chatting with him.

3. Exploration

According to user research, some users are more interested in exploration. Some people who are interested in connecting also want to explore local attractions as well.

The ultimate goal of exploration is to enjoy local experience matching users' interests and availability.

3.1 Exploring - related user flow and low-fi prototype

3.2 Exploring - related hi-fidelity prototype

4 Transition between connection and exploration

4.1 DESIGN CONSIDERATION - HOW TO ENABLE BETTER TRANSITION BETWEEN CONNECTION AND EXPLORATION?

Connection and exploration are the main user needs our app is trying to satisfy. Inside the app, they are two main features located on different pages. The challenge is how to enable users to smoothly jump between two features without spending much effort. At the same time, we want to increase user engagement and loyalty.

We approached this challenge by thinking about the user scenarios. When and how might a user jump between connection and exploration?

Low-fi prototype - Transition between connection and exploration

Scenario 1: Chatting with another traveler and both agree to search for a place to meet/explore. For this scenario, it's better to provide a shortcut from chatting page to exploration page.
Scenario 2: Selected a place to meet/explore and want to inform another traveler. For this scenario, it's good to provide sharing option on place/attraction information page as well as travel list page.

4.2 hi-fidelity prototype

Users jump to exploration page from chatting page. Users share a certain place to their connections.

Interactive Prototype

User Test

We conducted 5 user tests. All users were able to complete the tasks of connecting travelers and explore local experiences. However, we also found several design issues that confused users:

While on boarding, the "selecting interests by browsing and scrolling" step was not efficient. It would be better to have search functions so that users could quickly find and add their interest.
On exploring page, users easily met errors because of there were two same swiping left gestures to control different operations: favorite a place or switch to another category of places.

We refined the high-fidelity prototype according to the user test.

Lessons Learned

From this project, I learned how to collaborate with teammates with quite different roles. I'm the only designer in my team, along with project manager, user researcher, content manager and taxonomist. When designing interface, I always referred back to the user research documents developed by the user researcher. We met frequently to make sure the interface well supported the needs of target users. I also collaborated closely with the taxonomist and content manager, ensuring that the language I used on the interface was consistent with taxonomy and content strategy. I also conducted user tests together with the user researcher. It provided me insights on how to refine the prototype.

It's important to keep communicating with the team and informing them if there are any design updates. We used Google Drive to share files and named each file with the exact version number so that we didn't miss any updates.

Thanks for reading!

Qin