BRAINSTORMING

INTERVIEWS

User Study Goals

+    To find out more about the way people budget and prefer to travel so we can determine the functions of our app that will be more valuable to the target market.
+    To find out motivations that will keep people recording spending in our app while they travel.
+    Examine what information about travel plans and budget is most important to create a good information hierarchy in the app structure.

Interview Analysis

+   A majority of people go on one big personal trip a year, and those who travel very often usually do so for work. Our interview subjects reported approximately 70% personal travel and 30% work related travel, but those who did travel for work traveled quite frequently.
+    Many people said they budget their travel in some way. Those who don’t budget for personal travel often budget their work travel and record all receipts for company approval.
+    The average trip length reported was 1 to 2 weeks, although some users said they occasionally travel for a month.
+    Subjects were most interested in exchange rate tracking and optical character recognition.

How might we expedite the travel budgeting process?

PAIN POINTS

1. Foreign exchange rate & tourist pricing

When travelling and spending money in a different currency, some locals tend to take advantage of how they price goods and services for tourists.

2. Too busy to keep track

Users may find that it is hard to keep track of a budget on a trip since they are constantly spending, and may be using various purchasing methods, such as cash and credit.

3. Last minute decisions

Tourist attractions may sell their tickets at a higher price when it is closer to the date you wish to book. In order to avoid this, users may need to plan correctly and book well in advance to avoid higher costs.

RESEARCH ANALYSIS

PERSONAS

IDEATION & MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES

Visual Research

Our team performed UI/UX research in which we developed several moodboards to get a better understanding on which design style best suited our app design. Our main inspirations were light and minimal card based designs that heavily used pictures to showcase the travel destinations, and simple ways data visualizations that were easy to understand. From this, we ended up wanting a mix of photographs and colourful icons to showcase the playfulness and excitement that travelling can bring.

USERTESTING

Our team tested the initial prototype on 3 passionate travelers belonging to various age groups in order to test our user tasks and propose insightful questions regarding our product and its key functions. This involved the participants to go through tasks that were based around five objectives —

1. Adjusting finance related settings
2. Browsing for destinations
3. Customizing a trip budget
4. Recording transactions
5. Viewing transaction breakdowns

At the end of each session, we asked the user their thoughts and overall reactions about the app —

1. What do you think of our app overall?
2. Which tasks did you find easiest to accomplish?
3. Which tasks did you find the most difficult to accomplish?
4. Do you think there are any important function we might have missed?
5. Would you use the app yourself? if not, why?

Synthesis of Test Results

KEY FINDINGS & REVISIONS

LATEST SOLUTION

The Refined Prototype

SEARCH HUB

Discover Destinations

Users can search through recommended trips, as well as destinations based on their interests through the search hub. Each destination provides an average cost for daily spending habits.

FILTERING TRANSACTIONS

Budget Breakdown

Users can view their daily and overall trip budget based in their home currency. From this, they can filter through their transactions based on predefined categories.

MANAGING TRANSACTIONS

Add Photo/Manual Transactions

When the user takes a photo of their receipt, the app uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies to fill in transaction details, and users can also manually enter their transactions in case they didn't get a receipt. For both scenarios, the app automatically converts the transaction into the user's selected home currency.

REFLECTION & TAKEAWAYS

The Importance of Prototyping & User-testing

This project focused on process and iteration and as a team, we went through various design changes to create more usable interfaces. This project improved my prototyping skills and gain insights on user-centred design. I found this very rewarding, as I was able to define pain points and see real-world reactions to my design. By reaching this point in the design process, I better understand the value of user research. I also gained essential experience in properly and ethically conducting user-testing in order to improve and test the functions of our app.

A Balance Between UI and UX

An important learning outcome of this project was to not always focus on some design trends. An example would be adding background images of the cities, which was seen in many of our moldboard references. However, once we tried to do this, we were either wasting a lot of real-estate on this images, making the text look cluttered, or we found it hard to find images that were dark enough to add text on top of.

Therefore, there are common design practices and rules that should be followed in product design, but we also faced the hard-reality of using references on Dribbble or Behance may not equate to the most usable design.

What I Would Change & Next Steps

Some changes I would take if I redid this project would be to explore different softwares. For prototyping and designing, we used Adobe XD. However, with Figma starting to become more popular at the time, it would have been easier for us to use that software because of the collaborative elements that Figma allows.

Some logical next steps for Travelr would be to add on-boarding for the user and try to hone out any logistical issues involving the customization trip budgets. After this, we would ideally do another round of user-testing since our app changed dramatically from the critiques and insights that were received from the previous round of tests.

Simplifying the process of trip-planning and budgeting.

Travelr