Context:
Senior UX design course project.
MiTravel login page
MiTravel
The all-in-one travel planning tool for study and working abroad.
My Role:
Research, UI/UX design, interaction design, visual design, brand design.
Duration:
Mar. to Sep. 2020
- 6 Months
Context:
Volunteering as the UI/UX Designer
Overview
MiTravel is a travel planning desktop app, it's a startup/passion project currently under development. I volunteered in the project as a UI/UX designer in the team.
My Role
As the UI/UX designer of MiTravel, I was fully engaged during the research phased and helped created various pages of iterations of the initial MVP. Other than UI/UX design I helped created the brand logo and its various applications.
User Research
As a team, we conducted over 30 interviews with the prospective target audience which we determined from previous marketing research - travel hobbyists, digital nomads and study-abroad students. During the interview, we prepared different kinds of questions related to travel habits, goals and preferences.
Persona
After synthesized information from the interview answers, I helped craft the user personas collaborated with another designer in the team.
Persona of group traveler
Persona of solo traveler
Persona of university student
Persona of group traveler
MiTravel user personas
Ideation
As the limited time and resources, we decided to focus on group travelers for our MVP at the moment. We went back to our user research, and concluded the most common travel needs and frustrations for group travelers are:
+ Collaboratively planning with fellow travelers with different availability.
+ Keep track of changes made by fellow travelers.
+ Can't visit all the desired places travelers within the group want to visit in a limited time - thus need methods to effectively settle disagreements.
Coming up with the features
Keeping the core user needs and frustrations in mind, as a team we started brainstorming and came up with features that match the user's needs. Having realized there are many different features that our target users might need to satisfy their goals, we sort out the features by prioritizing them, so that we can have a clear focus when developing the MVP.
Using the online collaboration tool - Miro, the design team brainstormed and sorted out the features that we need in the current MVP.
Use Cases
Based on the persona created I helped develop the use cases of the app. Use cases are effective tools that help the design team understand the possible user flow when the user interacts with our product, which supports the creation of the information architecture.
Features
To help group travelers effectively collaborate in creating their travel plans, we designed two main features, the planning page and the itinerary page.
1. Planning space for group travel - Travel Planning Page
On the planning page, depending on the preference of the travelers, they can choose to have one planner and all the fellow travelers can comment and vote on the travel activities; or they could change the settings to all be editors and put their ideas on. Once travelers settled on an activity, they can then push the activity on the travel itinerary. The feature gives group travelers a space to discuss and keep track of changes for their travel ideas even if the travelers have different availability to plan.
The interactive prototype for the planning page
2. Travel Activities at a glance - Travel Itinerary Page
The travel itinerary page is the travel itinerary that contains all the made decisions from the planning page and shows all the planned travel activities with a timeline and the activity locations on the map. To enable flexibility in planning, users can still search and add activities directly here, such as a new location, flight ticket, and hotel reservations.
Collaborating with the design team, I created the planning pages and designed the interactions for the travel itinerary page.
User testings
After we had a working prototype, we reach out to potential users and conducted more than 10 user testings - usability tests, I helped interview 3 user testings. During the user testing, we started by asking series of general questions about travel preference and habits, then we introduce the app and ask them to go through several designed testing tasks interacting with the prototype using the think-aloud method.
Brand Design
To give the project a unique logo with a catchy look, the design team collaborated with the founder to create the MiTravel branding packages. During the process, I brainstormed iterations of the logo and helped settled on the brand font family and created the brand guide.
The brand logo, variants, and other brand guides.
Reflection
Working on MiTravel has been such a fun experience for me, the whole MiTravel team is very warm and enthusiastic. I have learned not only a lot of useful methodologies but also how to care for one another. The opportunity of working closely with the founders, the developer team, and the marketing team has also brought me understandings of the holistic view of the business plan and valuable experience to communicate and deliver the design works in a cross-functional team.
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When I was participated in designing the project, we have several rounds of iteration, during which we keep striping down the planned features, as we realized our limited resources and time doesn't match the scale of our planned MVP. I understand that the project is still under development, our prototype was still cranky, but I think as the team keeps pushing for refinement, it would be a smooth and helpful app.