Itinerary
DESCRIPTION
A mobile app for travel, with a focus on budgeting
I designed and prototyped the Itinerary app.
And I was also responsible for making the demonstration video.
MY ROLE
UX Research
Interaction Design
Overview
Mission
To design a mobile application to enhance the travel experience
Process
1. Research
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Six thinking hats
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Market research
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Interviews
2. Define
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Personas
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Scenario
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Image board
3&4. Design & Prototype
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Paper sketches
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Clickable prototype
Revision
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Critique session with other groups
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improved the prototype based on feedback
Outline
Team & Collaboration
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Team of 3
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Close collaboration within the project team;
weekly critique session with other groups, as well as getting feedback from the supervisor
Outcome
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Clickable prototype
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Demonstration video
Background
This project stemmed from an App ideation competition. One of the proposals introduced an App called "Travel Things", which aimed to assist tourist during their journey.
We found this topic interesting, thus we decided to discuss this further and investigate what can we design under this topic - "Travel".
Procedure
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Research:
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Six thinking hats
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Market research
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Interviews
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Define:
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Personas
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Scenarios
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Image board
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Design & Prototype:
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Paper sketches
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Interactive prototypes
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Revise:
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Critique session with other groups
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Refining the prototype
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Present:
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Storyboard
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Video making (filming and video editing)
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Result & Learning
Result
Itinerary is an app focusing on trip planning with an emphasis on budgeting, it can calculate total cost based on travel plans, or help the user to plan a trip within a given budget.
Following is the final prototype I made with Justinmind, and it's available here as an interactive prototype.
Learning
During this project, I've learned the importance of doing market research and user research. Sometimes people beautify their memories, thus during the interview, it's always good to ask for concrete description ("When is last time you face this problem? How did you tackle it?"), or ask for live demonstration ("Could you show me how you would do that?").
Appendix - Methods
Followings are some brief summary of the methods we used during the project. The whole process is documented on the project's blog.
Six thinking hats
After we decided the topic, we used "Six Thinking Hats" to assess our project from different perspectives before we went further and defined our scope. Here comes some of our discussion:
White hat - Information
The poster describes some features of the app.
We need to do research about other similar application, identify their features and think about what kind of function could be useful but haven't been implemented yet.
Red hat - Emotions
We are excited to design the travel app and willing to get inspired by experience from ourselves and others.
We would like to focus on features that help users plan their journey.
Yellow hat - Positive
Travelling is popular and almost everyone wants to enjoy the trip. We are interested in travel and thus we want to take this challenge. The strength of our group is that we have different backgrounds and skills, which provides a board area of competences.
Green hat - Alternatives
When planning a trip, or during travelling, tourists have to handle several tasks and most of them can be aid by an application, for example, finding information about attractions, arrange routes, booking transportation or accommodation, etc.
Black hat - Information
There are many existing applications for travel, it might be difficult to make our design special.
Time is always an issue when doing projects, we should be careful and efficient to be able to deliver on deadline.
Blue hat - Meta
The instructions from each crit session and seminar can help us to better structure our project.
As mentioned we want to have a different focus with existing applications and at this stage, we will look into travel planning and budgeting.
Personas & Scenarios
We reflected on our own experience and conducted interviews to collect data for personas and scenarios.
Daniel - Student User
Daniel is an international student studying in KTH.
He is crazy about exploring new places and everything new. Almost every two months he goes for a trip.
He prefers to plan everything in advance. He would carefully consider the budget due to limited money.
Basically, he loves exploring historical architectures and traditional foods. He wants recommendations for hotels, tourist attractions, and restaurants. And he values an economical budget plan.
Scenario
Daniel recently got a scholarship from his university so he plans to use the surplus on a trip to China.
But he is not sure about the consumption level in China and none of his friends can give him recommendations. He needs to make a rough budget plan to make sure the scholarship is enough for that. He also wants some advice from native people or experienced travellers.
Susan - Family User
Susan always takes responsibility for planning family journeys. So she wants specific information about whether a place is suitable for family activities or not.
Usually, she makes schedules for every day, but they're mainly about tourist spots, routes and don’t have any strict restriction on time.
She doesn't need to know about detailed consumption, but she wants to have a rough idea of the total budget according to her plan.
Scenario
Susan wants to organize a family trip during the upcoming summer holiday.
She wants to find a suitable destination for a family trip according to her total budget. Besides, hotels, nice restaurants and interesting attractions are also things that she has to consider.
She would like to spend money on an unforgettable trip, as long as the total cost is affordable.
Eric - Bussiness User
Eric is a successful entrepreneur. The effort he put into his company and career has made him lose contact with many close friends and neglected his family.
He used to love travel and had a goal to travel to an unfamiliar country at least once a year. Now he is considering to perform that goal. He collects information from different websites and finds it most convenient to use mobile apps when travelling. He likes to look at reviews and other tourists’ experience.
Scenario
Eric is having a 3-days long weekend and has decided to travel to Rome. Due to lack of time, he had no time to search for reviews and other recommendations so he has no ideas of which hotel to stay in or where to visit. What he really needs is a travel plan that can give recommendations for each day’s schedule, the route of easiest transportations, tips for tourists etc. Though he does not have a strict budget, it could still be useful to know how much this trip could cost.
Image board
We collected inspirational pictures of the project on an image board. It includes the first things that come to our minds when talking about travel, how we feel about trip planning and what would the plan looks like, and also the worst situation when someone spends all his money during the journey.
