ROAM
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A Travel Companion with Local Knowledge
People plan vacations well in advance so that they can make the most of their trip from the moment they arrive.
While happy to visit a famous landmark or two, the experiences that really inspire joy and last in the memory are those that capture the local culture and the traditions that make a place unique.
ROAM is a travel app that brings this understanding together, by showcasing recommendations from local guides and friends and letting users shape their travel itineraries in advance.
Project: ROAM travel app
My Role: UX/UI Designer
Team: Solo project
Deliverables: Exploratory Research, User Interview Insights, Persona, Wireframes, Mid-High Fidelity Prototypes, Usability Test Results, Visual Style Guide & Design Library
Tools: Sketch, InVision, Mural, Google docs, sketching, Post-it notes
The Case Study
To effectively pursue a Design Thinking approach I produced the following deliverables across the project:
Research Plan
In order to be able to effectively empathise with our users and begin working through the strategy of Design Thinking, I first needed to layout a Research Plan detailing what methods of inquiry I was going to carry out and what I hoped to gain from each.
Domain Research
Investigate the travel industry as a whole, looking into key players, emerging trends and the growing influence of technology on the sector.
Competitive Analysis
Identifying direct and indirect competitors and analysing what features they offer users as well as highlighting areas of opportunity for a new product.
User Interviews
To gather qualitative and quantitative insights into user behaviour and their emotions around planning and taking trips.
Domain Research & Competitive Analysis
Patient, thorough planning
On average a person spends 53 days visiting 28 different websites over a period of 76 online sessions to book a holiday.
Reviews matter
86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34).
A growing opportunity
Over the next 10 years, experts predict that the digital travel space worldwide will expand at an annual rate of 3.8% to reach $11.4 trillion.
Competitive Analysis
To learn more about current competitors I conducted a competitive analysis of 4 selected travel platforms to see what features were commonplace, understand how each stood out in a crowded marketplace and what opportunities were still to be explored.
I also researched three indirect competitors, to understand how products aimed at a different marketplace could help innovate a new concept.
User Interviews
To develop a human-centred design product, it was important to gather insights from real users.
3 interviews were conducted and recorded. From these transcripts, I was able to synthesize each participant’s behaviours, motivations, influences, goals and frustrations.
Some patterns began to emerge:
Unreliable reviews
Each had used crowd-sourced reviews in the past to help with decision making but also found that they could be unreliable.
Planning ahead
All participants planned for trips well in advance and made daily itineraries and budgets wherever possible.
Trust in local knowledge
They look for authentic experiences while away and see local knowledge as the most reliable.
Friends and family know me best
Recommendations from friends and family are also valued highly, with interviewees often sharing their travel advice with others when they return.
My tastes are unique, my apps should reflect that
Users looked for more personalised recommendations when using travel products.
Primary Persona
Using my research and interview insights, I began the Define stage and created the persona of Daniel.
Although a work of fiction, Daniel’s behaviours, goals, frustrations and everything else are drawn out of the previous deliverables and served as a tool to keep focus on the user at the centre of my design solutions.
Problem statement
“Organised travellers need an efficient way to plan for future trips and find local recommendations easily, because when they are away they don’t want to waste time searching for things to do or miss out on unique experiences.”
6-8-5 Sketching & Paper Prototyping
6-8-5 Sketching
Time to ideate solutions addressing our problem statement. To generate as many divergent concepts as possible, I turn to pen and paper and 6-8-5 sketching.
Paper Prototype
I evaluate the sketched concepts against the persona of Daniel and the problem statement and proceed to rapidly develop and test the most viable and interesting ideas in a paper prototype using pencil, paper and InVision.
Site Map
With the paper prototype having provided vital early feedback on the user flow, I now create an early iteration of the Site Map. As a deliverable, this helps identify the interactions and relationships between screens within the app and helps build a visual representation of the architecture necessary to develop the product.
Wireframes
To test the interactions and site architecture further, I iterate on my paper prototype by creating a mid-fidelity wireframe prototype using Sketch and InVision.
Trips itinerary screen (early iteration)
Trips
A key feature to assist organised travellers such as Daniel, will be the “Trips” navigation.
User’s will be able to add listings from the app to a trip they create. They can then assign a date to visit and an estimated cost for the experience for budgeting purposes.
An early example of the Trips itinerary screen was tested and found to be too crowded and resulted in a high cognitive load for the user.
A simpler UI with a singular purpose would be required for the feature to be successful.
Local Guides
Local guides provide the content for ROAM’s listings and reviews and ensure that the app showcases authentic local experiences alongside popular tourist destinations.
ROAM users are able to follow their favourite guides for updates on their new posts and mute others if they wish.
An early iteration of the Guide profile screen was tested. Users liked local guide reviews and the opportunity to personalise notifications but found the layout of the page to be obstructive and difficult to move through.
A new page layout, allowing for sections of content and more white space to better highlight the interactions available to users.
Guide profile screen (early iteration)
Onboarding
Testing the mid-fidelity prototype also allowed me to assess the onboarding flow of the app and identify what areas required improvement.
Users found the onboarding flow simple enough, but found progressing on from the “Connect with Instagram” screen confusing as the continue interaction was placed where the back button is traditionally found.
Reviewing the onboarding flow and conducting a Heuristic Evaluation according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 usability principles, would help ensure that mental models were maintained throughout and that a progress bar be included to provide system status visibility to the user.
Visual Exploration & Style Tiles
With the wireframes iterated and a user flow established, I now explore divergent visual concepts relating to the persona of Daniel. I begin with organising my ideas into Mood Boards, then develop these further into Style Tiles.
Introducing ROAM
After weeks of research, synthesizing, ideation, prototyping and testing, I produce the final iteration of the design as a high-fidelity prototype.
Onboarding
All roads lead to ROAM.
New users are invited to sign up and provide personal details. By asking users for their age and interests, ROAM can provide more accurate recommendations.
By connecting with friends, not only does ROAM become a social experience, but the user is also able to harness the power of user-generated reviews from the people they already know. Providing a platform to share personal recommendations and get inspired by people you choose.
Trip Planning
There’s no place like ROAM.
Users like Daniel spend months planning and budgeting for future trips; by allowing Daniel to create a Trip and organise itineraries within the app, ROAM becomes more than just a product for travel inspiration, but one of function and utility.
A new trip is set up once a user provides a name for the trip, the duration for the trip, budget for the trip (optional) and invites friends to collaborate (optional).
Once a trip is set up, users can add listings and set a date, time and estimated cost for each event.
ROAM will highlight any events within a trip that are unassigned a time or cost for review by the user.
Add to Favourites, Add to Trips
ROAM is where the heart is.
Shortlisting favourites is easy and intuitive within ROAM. Just click the ❤️ on any listing and it’ll get stored according to it’s category in the user’s favourites list.
Likewise, adding to a trip is easy, just select the suitcase icon on any listing and assign it to an upcoming trip.
Explore & ROAM Guides
When in ROAM…
Explore by category, set filters or see what’s nearby in Map view.
ROAM listings and reviews are provided by ROAM guides, local experts who provide users with recommendations on hidden gems and authentic not-to-be-missed experiences.
Users who are signed-in and connected with their friends can see what rating they have scored a particular place or experience too.
Final Reflections
ROAM wasn’t built in a day, but over 5 intense weeks of research, synthesis, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing (then looping back through the strategy again for good measure).
As a solo project, I was very happy with the result - an app that attempts to solve the problem statement I’d outlined and address a great many other user frustrations brought to light in the user research. Working on every deliverable from beginning to end meant that I was fully aligned throughout the project and exposed to all the UX and UI challenges along the way.
In hindsight, given the limited time scale to produce a product from scratch and take it to a high-fidelity prototype, I would now seek to find the product MVP earlier in the process and try to limit feature-creep emerging.
The project brief was a lot of fun, full of opportunity and instant ideas, however, trying to work across multiple features and their place within the product architecture, meant that core ideas and more complex interactions were not able to be as comprehensively user-tested and iterated upon by the end of the 5 weeks.
I’d be excited to start another solo project in the future and would look to set ambitious, but realistic expectations for the final handoff.