A travel log app for memories collector
Year
2018
Type
Concept Project
Lean UX
Jourvel was the first of four projects that I undertook during my
course at GA. We were paired up with our classmates and were assigned
to interview our partner about their interests and identify a problem
that could be solved with the design of a simple mobile application.
The task was to design an interactive prototype of a
mobile application for my classmate, Emily.
2 Weeks
Double Diamond
I started off with getting to know Emily to identify issues in her
everyday life. I asked her about her daily routines, her interests, what
she likes to do, and I found out that she loves to travel, and she often
travels abroad for vacation with friends and families. So I dug deeper
to learn more about her traveling experiences. I learned that her goal
was to have an awesome experience and she doesn’t want to miss out a
place, otherwise she would feel regretful, having travelled all the way
to the destination. I also discovered that she finds it difficult to log
her trips’ memories, and over time, it becomes hard for her to refer
back to it.
After the user interview, I laid out all my
findings into an affinity map to get a clear picture of Emily’s journey
in detail stages, the actions she take at each stage, and her emotional
reaction to each stage of the journey.
Above: Affinity Mapping | Below: Emily’s User Journey
Ideation Sketches
During the ideation and solution stage, I came up with several ideas
that could help Emily log her travel memories accordingly and in a
simple way. Some of the ideas I came up with were similar, but all of
the ideas revolved around a core concept to compartmentalize Emily’s
experiences according to her planned expectations of the trips and in a
simple way. I defined simple as an elimination of the hassle that her
plans, notes, pictures, and references are stored on several platforms —
on WhatsApp chats, Instagram, Photos, Notes, and Pages.
As I was ideating some of the initial ideas, I got lost into focusing on
the “streamlined process” and didn’t give much thought to “simplicity”.
I thought of a travel log app which acts as a travel diary, an app that
stores memories in a map form with voice detection so Emily can speak
about her experience and it would be automatically logged into the
itinerary. The first five ideas answer the same problem but their forms
were not simple and easy enough, and it all still seemed to be
complicated. But the sixth idea was a lightbulb solution, both function
and form were the exact translations of what I had in mind for the app —
I thought of creating a travel log app that acts as an all-in-one
platform that functions live with the camera while she is on her
travels.
After spending quite a lot of time on ideation, I then took a step back to see if the solution fits with the situation. I wrote the outcome statement and a storyboard to get a clear picture of how this mobile app will help tackle the issue.
Storyboard of how the app will help Emily
After knowing what application I was going to design, I made a user flow of how Emily will use the application. This was also to identify the screen flow of the app. I then began to design a prototype for the app.
User Flow
Before jumping straight into creating paper prototypes for the app, I
translated the screen flow into actions that Emily will take by using
the app.
The application helps her to:
1. Create itinerary
2. Document her trips and compartmentalize it to the itinerary she
created in 1.
3. Store all her trip information in one platform — can edit it, refer
back to it, and share with friends.
After creating the paper prototype, I uploaded the screens sketches
onto the marvel app to create a clickable prototype to be used in
usability testing. For the test, I created a hypothetical situation
that Emily goes on vacation in Thailand and identified that the
application has three main tasks. The usability test examined each
task scenario as follow:
TASK SCENARIO 1: Emily creates an itinerary.
TASK SCENARIO 2:
She is able to automatically categorize her media according to her
experiences.
TASK SCENARIO 3:
She can view/edit/share her travel log with friends.
After the test, I learned that there was a gap between my thoughts on
how Emily would use the app and the way she actually interacts with
it. I made iterations to the app after observing how Emily interacts
with the prototype, and how she wants the app to function. I factored
learnings from the test into the iteration and made the following
changes to the task scenarios.
Final Prototype