Trouvaille - Travel Like a Local
This project was completed over the course of 10 weeks as part of an Interaction Design course at UC San Diego. The premise of the assignment was to deliver a mobile web app that supported the activity of exchange. It was in the hands of our team to discover and define a specific design opportunity beyond this prompt.
With our needfinding, we found that when it comes to travel, mainstream attractions sometimes limits one’s experiences, overshadowing the true culture of an area. Tourists and locals need a way to share travel experiences and their memories of it so these cultural aspects have a better chance of coming into the limelight. Our challenge was to create a platform that could become a catalyst to this exchange of experiences but when doing so, should not impose more stress on top the already present pressure of planning.
Our Team
General timeline for the project. Obviously not this precisely linear, but the general phases lined up this way.
Our team of three consisted of myself, a computer science student, and an HCI student.
Most of my efforts went into prototype iteration and testing. As the prototypes became more technical and beyond my capabilities, I focused more on testing and giving design suggestions while occasionally assisting with implementing minor styling details on the prototype.
Final Design
Screenshots of our final design: Our concept was for travelers to be able to discover and join activities hosted by locals, in real time. During the activity, both the host and the traveler can contribute snapshots to a shared experience timeline. This experience can then be archived as a memory to be relived and shared down the line in the future.
Our Approach
Needfinding
I spent about two weeks observing different individuals, both their own approaches to travel planning as well as their interactions with makeshift experience prototypes prepared by myself. This needfinding helped my team establish our design challenge and highlighted some basic design considerations going forward:
Personal experiences, or abstract concepts like the atmosphere of a city, have more impact when communicated through photo or video
Text can be thorough but time consuming to read so only essential details should be written down.
Guided prompts for how to communicate travel experiences induce the most informative representations. Locals don’t have to overthink how and what kinds of things they should show and travelers get the details they need to make a decision.
Some quotes:
“It’s more interesting watching someone talk instead of just reading their opinion.”
“It’s nice to see what people my age do regularly because it gives me an idea of what my stay will be like.”
“I didn’t know what I should’ve focused on so I just took a video of what it was like to take the bus but I don’t know if that’s what people want to see.”
Paper Prototypes
Storyboard sessions were scattered throughout the paper prototyping period to try to foresee possible interactions needed for a coherent user flow.
Regardless of how much you think about it, you won’t know if your prototype works until you actually test it. So we did and we found that our prototypes were good but they weren’t great.
Prototype 1: There was an unnatural jump from reading an activity description to joining an activity. People should be able to chat with the host before making their final decisions.
Prototype 2: The process of logging a memory still needed more development. People should have more freedom to add photos when they want and the functions of the buttons on the page needed to be clearer.
Iterations and Testing
These wireframes were the basis for our interactive prototype. Structured prototype testing sessions were held during which users were instructed to accomplish a list of goals in the prototype app, without being given the specific steps on how to do so, then asked debriefing questions afterwards. We cycled through this process a few times to reach our final design for the assignment.
Reflection
Overall, I think our team was able to isolate an interesting design opportunity and create a viable design to address these issues. Our core idea of local-hosted travel activities was strong and well-received in our classes final showcase.
If I were to do this again, I’d have a number of more considerations:
More thought should go into how users impact each other. We need to put equal effort into designing for hosts, and how they manage their activities when more travelers join. I imagine that a lot of inspiration could come from user flows for drivers in rideshare apps.
Safety should be incorporated in all aspects of the design. We are implying that users spend a significant period of time with each other in person and online. Their safety and wellbeing should be more accounted for in the design, not just in potential legal matters.
I question the inclusion of the memory logging feature. I suspect that we were adamant on incorporating it so that we addressed this idea of exchange but in terms of the design, I feel like many assumptions were made in order to include this feature. If I were to go through this process again, I would be more mindful of our teams assumptions and more strict on what we consider essential to our design.