Problems

How do we streamline and improve from the previous road travel based design and improve it to a one stop travel assistant for our user?

Background

It is time-consuming and difficult when planning a complete trip and find all information afterwards.

Some families or people find out it is time-consuming and difficult when planning a complete road trip with the sites that they can drive through to their destination without diverge their main route and interested in. Our current course project is extremely similar from a previous project. Hence this project has turned in to a redesign project from my previous roadtraveller design since they are sharing a lot more similar information.

Goal

The Goal of TravelMate

Unlike the previous edition, which only focused on user’s needs for road trips. This time TravelMate focused on assisting our user as their one-stop personal travel assistant.

Users

Everyone who enjoys traveling around but gets frustrated by all the trip details

Everyone needs to keep track of their trip details from various websites, including Travel Information, boarding passes, Hotel/Car rental information, etc,. With so much information that a user needs to keep track of, our target user has been set to those who gets frustrated the most.

User Persona

Information Architecture

Low Fidelity Wireframe

The first round of low fidelity design inherited the major design from the original Road Traveller design. With some preliminary research research, changes were made based on the original design.

Pros:

• Minimalist Design

• Loved the community idea to communicate with fellow travelers.

Cons:

• Lack travel assistant functions

• No idea how community page would actually work

High Fidelity Design

After several rounds of virtual testing online, the first version prototype received mixed reviews from online testings. Several users believe that the design is still lacking some of the confusion, which made them a bit confused about the product itself. However, some of them do find the personal travel assistant is convenient for them to use on the go.

Improvements and Innovations

Iterate, iterate, iterate.

After getting the review back from users, several iteration has been made and test with more users. The new design is based on a card design that separated each section into a different card.

We have seen many different design for boarding passes. My design has included different barcode/QR code for scanning that users can simply tap and enable it in their trip page. However, this can be streamlined down to only one QR code/ Bar code if this application can be considered as a mainstream product that will be supported over different platforms.

People often underestimate the role of product manager. I have designed products without thinking about the product’s business concern, this project started out as me working as the Product Manager role, I always had to think not only about the design itself, but also make decisions about the business goals. This experience helped me understand that user experience design is always a part of a bigger picture.

Iterations can help you to build a better product

I have developed this project for 4 to 5 rounds of iterations now, it is interesting to see how this project has become from an initial idea to a possible product. Through out these iterations and user testings, it helped you understand which elements of my prototypes are working and which aren’t.