Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Susana Cabrera

I had to decide for an idea to develope a hole UX/UI process for my final project at Ironhack. I had some ideas coming to my mind.

I was thinking on doing something related with psychology or neuroscience, as it’s part of my background and I could use my knowledges to create something interesting.

But I also love adventure and traveling and I had been spending 3 months in South East Asia just before the bootcamp so, I thought I could do something new for me as it is a traveling App.

The project starts from some observations that I made during my trip to South East Asia:

When you travel through South East Asia generally the way to do is: get to the place, leave things in your hotel or hostel and get to see what you can do outside there.

Ubud (Bali ) streets, photo by Patrick Craig on Unsplash

From the same accommodation they usually offer different activities to do on the spot.

There are also many agencies on the street that will offer you activities and tours.

In 90% of the agencies (in hostels and agencies in the street), you will only have the option to pay these activities (snorkel, tours, cooking classes, temples..) in cash.

Paying in cash means going to the bank first, and make a withdrawal with its correspondent bank commission.

In addition, generally you are buying without any reference since most businesses do not have web or do not have ratings in google, so sometimes you end up seeing you did not do the best choice, or you find out that every person has paid a different quantity for the same activity.

This led me to think how useful an app would be to gather the best rated activities in every spot, be able to choose one with criteria, and pay it online.

That way we can buy at a fixed price, we can know the quality through the ratings of other users, we save the commissions of the banks when extracting money and we can buy in advance and schedule our trip.

So I imagined the idea and it seemed to make sense.

And I wanted to get further in making a better traveling experience with this app.

I imagined I booked online the activity and I am already in, let’s say, a great diving trip in Bali …

What else could make it become a greater experience?

Then I realized how important it is to meet nice people to have a great experience while traveling.

A spot can be beautiful, but many times it is going to be the people you are surrounded by who will make it unforgettable.

Traveling in South East Asia generally you can meet many travelers , but adding a tool to meet other people could make it easier and could allow people to join for activities.

But how to integrate this social function with the booking online system?

And will travelers want to buy activities online?

Will travelers want to meet other travelers through an app?

The first step I take is to organize the information in a Lean UX Canvas. For that I use the UX tool Realtimeonboard.

What is the first thing I need to know to start my research?

We see that the assumption that would make the project fall is that travelers do not see an advantage in booking online, and that travelers do not need to meet other travelers online. To assure that users want this app we need to confirm that:

H1: Travelers want to book online if they find the best activities at good prices without commissions.

H2: Travelers want to meet other travelers in the app if they find an easy way to find travelers and join activities.

Now it is time to get to know the users, test the hypotheses and find out what are the needs of the potential users.

I will use three different channels to empathize and get to know the users: Benchmark, Surveys and Interviews

Checking out the competitors is a must since they give us an idea of what is working, and they will give us information about the users behaviours and interactions.

One of the competitors is Tripadvisor, the number one website to see information of all the activities to do, with thousands of ratings and comments.It is very popular to know the activities of the place and see the ratings, but you can’t book most of the activities. *Update 10/2017: now they increased considerably the number of activities you can book online, it seems they have seen the business in here!

In addition to the competitors it is important to find more ways to explore our potential users.

In this project, analyzing the social networks we will find large amounts of information of users and their needs at no cost.

Facebook groups are a common channel for travelers.

To give an example, we have the group “backpackers in Southeast Asia” with 17914 members, with a high index of posts and interactions per day

The surveys were made in Google Forms, easy to make and to send to people. There were 103 people answering the survey.

Profile: +18 who like to travel.

The results show us good news: they are in the same direction as our hypothesis

For the interviews in this project I elaborated open questions regarding:

Experience buying activities and tours

Advantages and disadvantages of buying online while traveling

What they would like to find in an app for travelers, extra features

Both surveys and interviews are essential for good research.

While surveys allow us to approach more people at a lower cost, interviews allow us to investigate deeper into those aspects that interest us and discover new features or contributions that were not originally raised.

From the information I already got from user research through interviews and surveys and our previous research in competitors and social networks, it is time to order and synthesize this information to find insights and patterns.

The affinity diagram allows me to unify the analysis results from the benchmark, surveys and interviews (yellow post its). At the beginning we will have dozens of post its on our table, we will select the relevant ones that are not repeated, and we order them according to the topic (green post its) and we include them in a more global category (blue post its: E-commerce and Social).

In the SOCIAL category, we find a new functionality that we will explore thanks to the interviews:

The inclusion of a CALENDAR that reflects the trajectory of your trip.

This is a good example of user research can give you new insights into what the user needs. In the interviews some ideas popped out:

Having a very visual calendar, adding your own pictures
The concept of travel diary with personal notes
Public calendar on user’s profile

Other relevant findings from the research are:

People would like to meet other travelers with an app and would like to book online: we confirm the hypothesis.

Some people want to book before the trip (anticipation) and others want to book during the trip

People would like to make activities with other travelers: creation of a board to publish your bookings and let others join.

People would like to know about users before meeting: creation of social profile and chat

So the research approves us some functionalities:

Calendar

Travelers Board with bookings

Social Profile

Chat

Now that we know are users and their needs, we have to build different “personas” that will represent specific segments of users.

A persona is a fictional character that represents a user type. The idea is to cover all the specific segments of users, because users have different needs and will use the app in different ways.

In this project I divide the users in three big segments:

“John, family trip” is going to use the app to book family activities for him and his family.

“Maria, travels with a friend”, wants to book online with some anticipation.

“Marta, the friendly solo traveler” is looking forward booking and meeting other travelers.

Once we have our user personas we ideate the Customer Journeys .

Customer Journeys allow us to empathize with our personas and to see how they could interact with the app. They help us to find pain points (or problems while they are interacting in the app/web) and then find solutions for it, that sometimes are new features.

Let’s see the customer journey of the representation of the “solo travelers”, Marta the friendly solo traveler.

Here we see the walk that Marta is doing through the Search and the Reservation (online booking). The blue boxes represent the pain points and solutions.

For example, once Marta has made a search for diving in Bali and knows all the options she has, she can think it is not so necessary to book online.

As a solution, we will add a component in the Activity booking “ There are only x places left” so she thinks twice about it.

Ok, I buy it

One problem that came out while ideating the journey of Marta was about the information of your booking reservation.

What if you want to share it with your trip friends so they can book it too?

This reinforced the idea of the calendar, not only as a diary but to use it as a marketing strategy:

From the calendar you can share your activity to the travel board so other users book the activity.

This way you encourage easily your traveling friends to download and use the app.

Also I imagined that a user (Anna) has seen at the travelers board that Marta has booked the diving activity and she is writing to Marta.

If the interaction between them is good probably Anna will buy the diving lesson.

So it is important to make it very easy for Anna (users) to find the way to chat with Marta, as the chat will lead to sells.

To ideate the functionalities and how they are going to work, I use different methologies such as Brainstorming, Mind map and Hand Sketch Concept.

Once everything is concreted, it is time to design the flows, then the wireframes and after testing them, the prototype.

The user flows allows us to see all the routes that users can take inside the app. This makes it possible to structure the design and have all the parts and directions into account

The wireframes are the visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of the app, and we use it to show navigation paths. Once they are made I test them before I elaborate the prototype.

Héctor Calaza giving some feedback

You can check here the final prototype!

UX Study Case · Trip&Fun was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX Study Case · Trip&Fun

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles