INTRODUCTION : -
Most of us love travelling and also most of the people travel for the purpose of business meetings or for some official work or for just spending time with family and friends so, this idea of building a travelling app is very profitable thats why I decided to build a travel app because anybody who travels, wants to take rest after they came from a really tiring journey so I decided to make an app for booking hotel rooms which can make the hotel booking much easier and simple.
Project idea:
A marketplace for tourists and guides. Guides provide excursions, tourists buy excursions.
Working steps:
Competitors research
Design sprint (1st)
User testing with tourists
Design sprint (2nd)
User testing (customer experience)
Branding sprint
Landing Page Design
User Journey Map
Creating the interface for tourists
Interface for guides
User testing with guides
Competitors research
Competitors offer excursions and mostly they are not at all authentic. For example, it’s just resale of tickets from travel agencies, a sale of entrance tickets to parks, museums, attractions. Somewhere this is a private excursion only: a tourist and a guide, but often this is the resale of tickets for boring tours of top tourist locations.
Market Validation
We found researches, that most tourists do not plan in advance what to do on the spot, they buy airline tickets, book hotel, but procrastinate entertainment.
Since the content is one of the most important in this application, it should be authentic and interesting. Therefore, we have implemented scheme recommendations of the excursions and on the basis of this have come up with a business model.
The first design sprint
We wanted to test our hypotheses, quickly develop a prototype of the product, find out what potential customers think, so we chose the methodology of Design sprints. I will not go into the details of the methodology.
Creating the goal
We started with an optimistic one: everyone expressed the global goal of our project.
Goal: To generate a new niche through which will pass 1% of all journeys in the world.
Sprint questions
Questions for the sprint are: How can we create a new market and become NO.1 on it? How can we be credible for users? How can we become more competitive than any other similar app?
Map
Point of focus: Search and order activities for travelers.
I drew the map, we thought through the full interaction of the product, starting from the moment when the user finds out about the project, and how the user can achieve the goal within the product.
Vertically, I placed predefined stages “Discovery, learning, using, and the goal”. It really helped because it was difficult to start from scratch.
Horizontal I placed roles that we have in the project: tourist, guide, moderator, blogger. Our roles in the product corresponded to our business model with the changes that emerged during the discussion. We added a moderator of content and support.
HMW & Expert interviews
We also tried to look at the project from a different angle and take into account the negative consequences in order to avoid them. We posed uncomfortable questions: What can go wrong? Where is our weak point? We invited all members of our team and people who are experts in their field to give their opinion. During the discussion and the expert interviews, more and more new questions appeared, which I, as a moderator, wrote down on post-it notes.
We recorded all potential problems with the product in the HMW format. I adore this method, thanks to the formulation, potential problems can look not intimidating, but like a task that can be solved.
HMW: To help recommend the app to friends? To track the activities of friends? To find out the user’s dream and offer him a service?
Prototyping
The fourth day of the design sprint was devoted to the creation of the prototype. We had to do quite a voluminous interactive prototype that involves the full path of the product and user interaction (based on design sprint map), starting with the first stage — advertising on Instagram.
User testing
To find respondents for the user testing I used Facebook ads. I tried 2 ad companies: with the goal to fill in the questionnaire and to write directly in Facebook Messenger, but successful appears only the questionnaire ad.
The screening of respondents was carried out using the Google Forms questionnaire. I eliminated the respondents with a special question, where it was necessary to choose the correct answer (interest: travel), those who chose — pass to the next questions and I invited respondents to the user testing.
I sent invitations with a personalized email to everyone, those who agreed were recorded in the calendar
For video calls, I used Google Hangouts.
1.5 hours were allocated to each respondent. All respondents were very cool, they travel a lot, and they were from our target audience. At first, I asked general questions, then we proceed to questions related to the topic, finally, I showed the prototype, asked to complete the tasks, observed the responses and mood. I recorded testing on the video, for the purpose to review and analyze.
An important result of the testing was that users liked the product, it even solves their pain points, which they had expressed during the user testing. Our hypothesis that users do not book in advance the excursions was confirmed, and also that speed and unique customized content is important to them.
We showed several versions of the application interface in the form of cards (like in a tinder) and in the form of a map. We made bets that the cards option would be preferable, but surprisingly most users did not understand it or did not like it, so we decided to continue on with the interface, where activities are shown on the map.
Second design sprint
The second design sprint was conducted by the abridged version and was completely devoted to the customer experience, interacting with the product offline. We conducted another user testing in order to find out how they interact with the application offline, in unforeseen, controversial situations.
For example, we specifically made mistakes in the prototype and observed how users will solve them. We figured out whether the support of the app is clear, and how we can design the most effective customer care, we also corrected some obscure points, that were in the previous prototype and tested it with users. We made a more detailed description of the excursion page.
According to the second user testing results, we found that:
Users do not want to be involved in activities where physical work is required.
Not everyone was easy to contact the guide or support.
Users don’t want to read a lot of text after booking.
Designing interface for tourists
After conducting user testing, I made the report. New interface software requirements specifications were created. As I have already said, the user interface with the map was understandable and preferable for users, then the interface with cards, so we decided to continue on with this. Especially since such an interface is more suitable for our brand’s values — an instant booking during the journey.
Conclusion
With the data collected in the research phase we decided to solve the lack of organization when traveling because it was one of the biggest pain-point for our users and I firmly believe that with our solution we have solved the problem in an easy and efficient way.
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