TravelXplorer is an innovative travel app that focuses on authentic local experiences, cultural connections, and meaningful interactions between travelers. It emphasizes deep exploration and provides a strong community platform that connects travelers from all around the world. With TravelXplorer, users can discover hidden gems, connect with local hosts and guides, share travel tips, and engage in enriching cultural exchanges, making every journey a memorable and meaningful adventure.

My Objectives:

Define if users need this app (if not — how I can change it).

1. Bring ideas how to satisfy these needs.
2. Build a prototype to test my ideas.
3. Implement my ideas in final project.

I used a design thinking approach for all these steps.

Empathize

Research

My principle is “Start design with Why”, aiming to gain a clear understanding of the users' needs for this app. It involves delving into their goals and exploring how they plan to accomplish them.

I set up interviews’ objectives, target audience, and questions before starting the interviews.

Objectives

Research summary

I conduct these interviews either in person or through Zoom, and gathered responses from approximately 50 participants.

Key Findings:

Define

Persona

I have divided the primary target audience of TravelXplorer into four groups, including:

• In-depth Travelers
• Tour Guides
• Local Cultural Organizations
• People who love cultural exchange

And created 3 user personas based on the research results to understand user behavior, needs, experience, and goals.

Naturally, this also leads to 3 different but closely connected objectives to consider in our ideation phase.

Defining and prioritising solutions

Utilising user jobs across our personas to further define our solution scope for an MVP.

Ideate

Creating a powerful community that connects travelers together.

Leveraging our key findings and persona attributes, I understood that the ideal solution must be able to provide a community of travel enthusiasts, connecting individuals to support each other, share information, and create travel plans. This not only fosters user engagement but also offers travel industry professionals a vast platform to reach potential customers.

Limited resources forced me to re-prioritize the features based on impact and effort

With a shorter time scope and technical feasibility, I decided to focus on features that require low effort but yield high impact with the initial MVP.

User flows

Working through the user flows helped me to map out the paths a user would take. Made me aware of many mistakes that can be avoided before starting the wireframing process.

Wireframes

After understanding user needs and the app's overall structure, I created wireframes based on the priority of features.

The wireframing process was where things began to fall into place and become more tangible.Trimming down to focus on my MVP was now vital to the completion of this project.

Usability Testing

To validate my designs and test prototypes, I conduct a face-to-face usability test with 8 people. I asked the participants to complete several scenarios:

• Task 1: Create a 3-day travel plan for a solo trip to Amsterdam.
• Task 2: Adding a spot to your plan.
• Task 3: Invite friends to co-edit the travel plan.
• Task 4: Find and save a guided tour with a local tour guide in Tokyo.
• Task 5: Explore the community section and write a post seeking travel companions for a hiking trip to the Swiss Alps.
• Task 6: Use the app's search function to find a cultural workshop or event then add it to Saved List.

Feedback from the participants

• User-generated travel tips were highly valued as they provided authentic and valuable insights into the destinations
• Users appreciate the app's feature of recommending nearby local hosts/guides, making it easy for them to find hosts in any location during their trip.
• Users have expressed some concern about the feature for finding travel companions. They are unsure if they will get along with potential travel buddies or if it is safe to connect with strangers online.
• Users have concerned that some of their friends may not have downloaded the app yet. When they try to share their travel plans with friends for collaborative editing, they wish for a quick and seamless registration process to immediately start planning the trip together.
• One of the participants suggested an interesting idea, stating that when users open the app, it should provide real-time suggestions for nearby places of interest, local cuisine, activities, festivals, local guides, and tips, similar to Google Maps. He believes that this feature would be more helpful for those who have limited time to plan their trips in detail. With just a simple tap, they could instantly get inspired with travel ideas from the app.