Travel Planning App
At the beginning of 2022, Louise Dowds and I began working on an idea for a travel organiser to be used on mobile devices with the aim of making something that takes the stress out of travel planning. Louise is a skilled product manager, with experience in customer research and feature prioritisation. I used my experience with product design to focus on producing prototypes and design assets.
The main problem we were aiming to solve is to minimise the stress and burden of on-the-go travel-related organisation that requires advanced planning, such as accommodation, travel documentation and activities that require booking. We wanted to break these down and put them in a format where users could organise them as they see fit and shape their own structure of how they want to think about their travels.
Firstly, Louise carried out interviews to determine the habits and issues people have when using currently available methods of planning travel. A description of her findings and the process of running these interviews can be found here. What was established was that a key source of stress was not having a clear overview of which jobs had been completed at each point throughout the process of planning for a trip, and that people wanted flexibility to group and organise things in their own way.
From these interviews, Louise produced her own click-through wireframes with Balsamiq showcasing her interpretation of the customer needs expressed in the interviews, and conducted user testing to fine-tune the user experience requirements. I consulted throughout this as we translated interview results through to changes needed in the designs, and then produced high-fidelity designs using Figma after a number of wireframe iterations.
The initial designs were enhanced using Figma’s prototyping features to create another click-through prototype, which was then tested with more potential users in interviews. Alongside this, I used the opportunity to practice producing a design system, including colour schemes and a component library to make extending and manipulating the expanding number of screens an easier task. More customer interviews gave us feedback on some cosmetic elements, so I spun off a design variation to address the points raised, improving on the first iteration.
I took the designs and decided to elaborate on some animation elements, firstly using Principle, and then later with Adobe After Effects.
With Principle, I investigated a possible loading animation for the list view, specifically the list of user’s Trips, with the list items expanding into view to be used after remote content has been fetched. It also includes the status bar expanding and morphing to a welcome banner (see combined showcase above).