Wander
Overview
Summary: My UX Design and Usability Class final was the creation of a new app. It could be any type of app, so I chose to create a travel app for millennials. This app would be based on geolocation recommendations through notifications. The app would learn what type of attractions users would like based on a travel quiz and then their further interaction with the app.
Class: MEJO 581 UX Design and Usability
Programs Used: Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator
UX Techniques Used: Audience Analysis, Interviews, Personas, Journey Mapping, Think-A-Loud Protocol, Flowchart, Wireframing, Mockups
Audience Analysis
According to a report in 2016, millennial travelers are spending more money on travel compared to previous generations, even though they are usually conscious spenders. Travel is where millennials splurge because it is one of their top priorities, it comes second right after living a healthier lifestyle. Furthermore, millennials are more likely to use traditional and non-traditional types of research when planning their vacation. 79% of research is done online and 49% of that research is done on a smartphone. When planning their vacation, the same report notes that millennials are interested in having unique, personalized travel experiences and that they are more likely to be drawn to visual depictions of travel with text to back up the photos than other forms of content.
Based on this information I wanted to create a photo forward app that focused on a non-traditional research for millennial travelers.
Personas
Personas were creating using both the audience analysis and interviews with individuals who met the audience criteria. The questions asked during the interview were:
Tell me a story your favorite travel memory?
How do you like to travel?
What do you enjoy about traveling?
What do you find stressful about traveling?
Based on the answers to these questions I realized that people usually fell into two types of travelers, those who plan and those who go with the flow while traveling. Some interviewees were a combination of both, or leaned more one way than the other. Most users were also concerned with travel fitting within their budget. With both kinds of travelers often were under constraints of a budget, with this in mind I created the following user needs.
Minor Needs
A user can easily understand what opportunties are must see.
An app that is aware of budget constraints of the user.
Critical Needs
Flexible geo-navigation for both the planner and laidback traveler.
Sharing options for groups of people who travel together.
Flowchart
The next step I focused on was the creation of the flowchart for the app, I wanted to do this before the journey mapping phase so I had an idea about how users would experience with the app.
Journey Mapping
After figuring out the flowchart and checking it over with peers, I focused on how different kinds of users would flow through the app before discovery and then to the point of advocacy.
Wireframes
After thinking through the flowchart and user journey I created wireframes to make sure the flow would work and the respective features made sense before going to my first mockup.
First Design
After creating the wireframes and tweaking the design slightly based on feedback from my classmates, I created the first mockup of the design that was user tested on.
User Testing
For user testing we used usertesting.com, each member of our class had access to three free tests from the website. I created a 8 question user test to go through the major functionality of my mockup and also ask about the feeling users got when looking and interacting with the app. Notes that were important for my design are as follows.
positive
The concept of the app itself was attractive, specifically a travel app that learned what they liked and then suggested via geolocation from those preferences.
When looking at attractions on the Adventure Map, most users appreciated the price being included in the thumbnail of the attraction.
Users like the image heavy nature of the app.
NEGATIVE
The color choice was brought up a lot, many users thought it had to do with nature, not travel.
Users wanted to be able to close out of suggestions on their trips pages that did not interest them.
Finding the budgeting settings was not intuitive.
Neutral Suggestions
Add a way to rank travel preferences in the travel quiz.
Final Design
For the final design, I changed the color scheme and also focused on fixing the functionality flaws the users pointed out during the testing phase. View of the click-through mockup.
Takeaways
Online user testing is fast and yields honest feedback. I was surprised how honest the users were when talking about my design. I had only done face to face user testing up to that point so it was novel to see how quickly users in my demographic took to saying what they liked and didn’t like about the app.
Color choice matters. The largest problem with my first mock up was color choice. All three users commented on the color choice and how poor it was. One user went so far to say that it made her sick. Point taken, I will workshop colors a lot more thoughtfully even before the first test, if it is a full color mockup.
Audience analysis helps set a designer up for success. It was interesting to see how right the audience analysis said millennials like picture forward travel research websites or apps. Both the users tested and my classmates wanted larger pictures, and user generated pictures for the places on the app. Audience analysis helped me focus on making sure images were highlighted from the beginning.