T.AI Travel Assistant - A Case Study
Tai, a Travel Assistant app to plan your trips without the hassle of coordinating places of interest between friends & families
CHALLENGE BRIEF
This project is on prototyping and the topic that my partner had chosen for me is Travel.
Tools Used
Invision
Project Duration
4 days
METHODOLOGY APPROACH
Discovery
User Research
User Interviews
Define
Synthesizing Results
(Affinity Map)
Problem Statement
Develop
Storyboard
User Flow
Paper Sketch
Prototype
DISCOVERY
I started by identifying who are the target audience to interview. Also, those who have traveled for the past year for better recollection. Then, a discussion guide was created to look at their needs and behaviours around 6 broad topics.
In total, there were 8 participants, age range from 20-35 years old and they traveled mostly with friends and families.
Interview Topics
- Prior Experience
- Preference / Expectations
- Booking Methods
- Travel Frequency
- Budget
- Pain Points / Challenges
DEFINE
From the user interviews, I synthesize using affinity map and found these themes emerged after several iterations. These themes formed the basis of my problem statement.
Problem Statement
Users planning to travel as a group, need a way to organise travel itinerary with others because it is tedious and confusing to coordinate with everyone's preference and expectations.
Solution?
A mobile app that allows users to submit their travel preferences and share them to make planning trips together easier and less daunting.
DEVELOP
User Flow
From the research, I created a user flow to illustrate how users would plan out their trip. This informed me of what type of considerations taken to organise a trip such as
- Choosing location, activity preference which is done by swiping suggested options provided by the app, which in turn learn their preference,
- Sorting out everyone's availability with a date range and length of trip
- Suggest locations and activities into an itinerary that best fits the group selection.
- If there's a point where the app could not decide, users would be able to vote for their preferred choice.
Prototype
I tested out using the paper protoype for early validation if the solution would work with those travellers and made these changes based on their feedback as I moved to create the mid-fidelity prototype.
1) Preferences
Some participants felt that swiping 10 cards at the start of using the app may be too long before they can even start using the app.
Added a skip button for each preference page and a gear setting on the explore page so that they can revisit their preferences.
2) Decision Making
Participants were not able to add new activities onto the itinerary and find a way to decide between options available.
Added a + button so they can input new activities directly on the itinerary and included an option for them to vote.
3) Personalised Dashboard
Participants took many steps to find out what they have planned for the day and wanted a quick and easy way to plan for the day ahead.
Changed the profile page to a personalised dashboard that is based on what had been planned on the itinerary, shows what the next step to take and provide suggestions based on current location.
TAI THE TRAVEL ASSISTANT
Interative Prototype
INSIGHTS
- User research and validation is very important as it molds the solution around the problem at hand tightly
- Good to distill what the users actually mean versus what they say and to find focus to the main problem that needs solving
- Consider having labels to icons as users would interpretate differently.
REFLECTIONS
- Defining user profiles by age, profession and use of personas for primary and secondary consideration (i.e. pleasures, frustrations)
- Start small and test early with users before creating more pages
- Consider to include a process to better manage such decisions, perhaps a voting system and chat/comment function
Disclaimer: This is a project work done as part of the General Assembly's User Experience Design Immersive 10-week Programme.
Selected Works
