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A new app born from user-centered insight aiming to help world travellers connect quickly and feel safe whilst on the move.

My goal was to create meaningful and user-centered solution through a design thinking framework. I aligned User Interface (UI) development with a new brand vision that would resonate with the target audience outlined through rich persona creation.

Defining the opportunity

Travelling is extremely sociable and you meet lots of people along the way. The task of sharing a phone number or social media information and even spelling someone's name correctly leads to a lot of confusion and is generally solved by handing the phone over to the friend for them to input the information. This is likely to be done in rush whilst parting ways and isn’t the nicest way to say goodbye to a friend.

How can travellers connect quickly to share their details and stay in touch?

User Research

Using the initial insight with the aim to help travellers connect I wanted to expand the empathise phase to understand how a traveller feels throughout the entire travel experience. There may be further insights that could be built as features in the product. I conducted user interviews and a lot of direct observation to gather rich understanding of the user.

User Interviews: I had the opportunity to interview and record a number of travellers and importantly these were conducted within the context of a travel environment thus providing rich and highly relevant feedback. I was careful to be sensitive towards every individual and conducted relaxed interviews with the aim to tap into emotions.

Synthesising the data through Empathy Mapping

I created an empathy map to synthesise what I had learnt from the user research and better understand the users to gather the most valuable insights.
From the tagging of insights and analysis of the empathy map there were three clear areas that stood out as priorities for the users:

Safety - feeling safe and telling people you are safe and where you are
Connecting with new friends easily across several different platforms
Staying organised - lots of worries around losing things

Redefining the opportunity

Following the user research it was clear that the initial insight was not the biggest worry for travellers and therefore there was a bigger business opportunity. The project scope changed and evolved to include more features in the Minimal Viable Product.

Wire framing

With three clear user needs to solve I decided these elements had to all be accessible from the home page:

Sharing contact details
Sending location
Storing important travel documents

I started the process of creating wireframe sketches to work through the navigation and laying out the pages. I like to mock ideas up in Figma quickly to give me a feel for the idea and it also helps to process the concept and figure out what works and what is missing.

UI design and branding

This was a quick exercise to create a believable product for initial testing. The app had to be youthful, engaging and capture the energy people have when travelling. The brand name, visual style and design system was established to aid the testing phase only to create a medium fidelity prototype.

Hooked principle

The investment phase of the hooked principle (by Nir Eyal) is considered the most important as it ensures the app becomes a necessity. This is fulfilled through the customisation of the app allowing users to add information, lists and documents that they rely upon on a regular basis. There was a clear requirement to allow users to adapt the app in a way that they find useful for their individual needs.

UI development

Whilst working through the prototype I developed the components to improve the accessibility and intuitive interaction.

The addition of icons to the buttons aids ‘explicit’ or ‘perceptible affordance’ showing what the button is used for. This improves accessibility and makes them more user friendly.

A sliding action for sharing the users' location rather than just a button ensures that its a deliberate movement rather than tapping it by accident. The sliding motion links nicely to the action of sending something, creating an emotional link.

Prototyping

Importantly I started the prototyping phase by setting out a clear objective of what I wanted to test. Due to the simplicity of the app it didn’t require paper testing and so I decided to create a high fidelity interactive prototype in Figma. This would allow me to undertake moderated and unmoderated usability testing to get rich and insightful feedback from users.

What's next?

I view this prototype product as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and there is plenty of opportunity for expanding this product. The client is currently creating a developement team to build the app and take the prototype through the next phase of development.