Venture
A mobile app that makes planning a trip and keeping a budget easer for you and your friends.
My role:
Research • Interview • Design
Team: Tom York, Beth Dunford, Payton Cheney, and Zoey Kaelberer
July 2020 - August 2020
Goal: Build a travel itinerary planner to make travel easier and more collaborative for millennials.
Survey & Interviews
The main purpose of our survey and interviews was to understand how our users planned and traveled and what they felt travel included.
Out of 101 people who took our survey, 80% said they defined travel as going 100 miles or more and if they were to stay overnight.
In another question we asked, over 86% of respondents research a trip if it's to travel to a foreign country and 70% research a trip that's out of state. These two points of knowing how far and when someone plans their trip helped the foundation of how our app would function and hopefully when a user would download and use the app.
I conducted three interviews and with wanting to hear the similarities and differences of how millennials travel when they're single, married with kids and married without kids. A huge difference was how having kids made planning vital and if plans fell through or not that they considered a trip a success or not. With building out our persona, we were able to get most information from other interviews conducted by my other team members and my interviews.
Interaction Flow
We started our user story map based on his goals and frustrations and how this app can solve those. With the main app features we chose that having different landmarks, restaurants and lodging similar to how Yelp has users rate and share their experiences would be a huge benefit since many Millennials focus on reviews and experiences of others.
Two things we had thought was important but later realized wasn't MVP was a map feature to plan different points of interest by distance all at once and to manually draw routes on streets. We also wanted to provide value for the user and a quick preview of how the app was before they needed to sign up so we had come up with the landing page to have signup/login buttons but to also be able to see popular food and activities. Why I felt so strongly to have these features was to keep the user safe, one of the goals is to stay safe and I feel that being able to share your location and planning routes would solve that.
From here we created the user story map and the flow map. We started with the user's goals and frustrations and how the app could help the user with those points. This was very helpful in not just mapping out what we needed, but to be able to know the exact screens and experiences a user would go through and then being able to share the work amongst us in the group.
The wireframes I worked on and later prototyped were the landing page, login page, sign up page, and the screens for the budget center. Taking the knowledge we learned from VaxTrax, I designed the first page to show value to the user before prompting them to log in or sign up for an account. For my Budget center screens, I took inspiration from financial businesses like Mint and NerdWallet. I knew I wanted a chart of some sort since most people can imagine things better visually and to be able to track their expenses lets them be more aware of their budget.
We also learned from our first project and we had a Brand Guide built out. The colors we chose were to be calming and similar to a sunset, we wanted our users to not experience the usual stress of planning a trip and believed the colors wouldn't be triggering.
The goal of our usability testing was to fully observe and improve the overall user experience for the app and we wanted to identify
if our app flowed and if the interactions made sense for users
if users could plan a trip
what errors could be discovered
if features we included added value and if they made sense to the user, like adding documents or adding collaborators
We had six tasks for them to complete and also had them give us ratings and feedback. I was able to hold three tests with potential users.
We held two rounds of usability tests and applied feedback into our low-fi and hi-fi prototypes.
Qualitative Feedback
Budget and Length of Time were very important considerations
“Add Trip” and “Find Your Next Destination” were confusing and similar
Needed to clearly identify why Venmo info was requested
Tips section was liked
Spelling error under lodging for “nexxt”
Would like an option to add to calendar
Should explain the document button in add activity/event section of itinerary
Being able to upload a receipt and keep track was a big win
Too many clicks to add a document
“It was easy to know where you were and what you were looking for. It was good to be able to upload your documents so you don’t have to carry them around all the time. It also was good to have reviews and suggestions to find out the best trip.”
“Some of the functionality still seems a little confusing. Maybe it's just because it is a prototype, but some things that I clicked on didn't do what I expected.”
Quantitative Feedback
Task Success: 71/75=95%
SEQ (single ease question): Average 5.75
TOT (time on task): Mean: 44.55
NPS (net promoter score): +23
SUS (system usability score): Overall score of 76.4
Product/Market Fit: 0% said they would be “Very Disappointed” without our product; 77% Said they would be “Somewhat Disappointed” (n=13)
Final Prototype & Takeaways
Taking into account feedback from our instructors and users, we finalized the hi-fi prototype which can be viewed here.
Main takeaways:
Not everything that we think is a good idea, is a good idea
Some ideas/features we think would be an important ended up not making it onto the final prototype. It's important to have ideas, but to not try and fit it all in right away. For example, our map feature, we came to the conclusion that even though that was a great feature to have there are a lot of GPS apps that users could use before we add that feature to our app
How important it is to trust the data and research
Be humble
Words are important, similar phrases and words can really impact a design
Button placement needs to be considered thoroughly
What I would have done differently in hindsight:
Use more time to try and do more research on certain features, to see if they are essential and if users see value in just some parts of the app or as a whole. Each step in this project took us about a week or less and spending more time on maybe one or two aspects would have given us a clearer understanding of why something worked or didn't work
Try different testing methods like A/B testing and get a larger number of people for our research
Go over and revise all the screens and fix screens with mistakes so that everything is consistent
Upload the prototype on my own account right away so there wouldn't be issues with viewing the prototype
Make sure our communication was solely on one platform, because trying to go through Slack messages, emails and even texts got confusing in trying to find a history of our process