Role
UX/UI Designer.
Overview
Vacay is a travel organisation mobile app that stores travel research and notes for users to then turn into scheduled plans on a travel itinerary.
Challenge
Often people make travel bookings spread across many different websites, emails and apps for their entire trip, whether its plane tickets, transport, rental car bookings, accommodation, notes and website links on cool places and activities that they’ve found online.
The challenge is to design an MVP of an app that users can easily access their travel research on, and then schedule activities that they have researched into a trip itinerary. This will enable them to be more organised and make them feel like they are making use of their travel research as well as making the most of their time while travelling.
Approach
By conducting user interviews and creating an affinity map, my findings helped shape a user persona of a highly organised yet flexible and adaptable traveller. The user would research thoroughly prior to travel, yet once at their destination liked to go with the flow in regard to activities.
Based on the persona insights, I started to breakdown and map out the different user needs and goals. This helped me to further define the product’s scope, as well as the functional requirements and features. User flows were created which were then turned into paper prototypes so some basic user testing could be done at this stage of the project. Mid fidelity, then high fidelity wireframes were created from these, which were uploaded into InVision for clickable prototype user testing.
The InVision prototype user testing highlighted a problem with users navigating between the itinerary and notes screens. The small icon button was swapped out for a more obvious way of navigating between screens.
Solution
The aim was to design a clean looking interface to maximise the user experience and the product’s overall performance so they could achieve their tasks easily.
I designed a set of icons to help further guide and engage users. The itinerary category icons were coloured coded so the user could easily define the category type on the map. Some form of colour coding within the app was highlighted as important for users from the initial user interviews.
Onboarding screens were created to help highlight the main tasks of the app for first time users. Creating the onboarding illustrations was also another great opportunity to reinforce some of the key brand colours and to add to the user experience.
Results
From user testing of the final MVP, users felt the app would make them more organised as travellers, yet still give them the ability to stay fluid and change plans – which initial user interviews revealed was a key requirement of the target audience. An organised yet adaptable traveller is a happy user, and a happy user is a happy traveller!