WHY SERENDI?
Ser·en·dip·i·ty
The act of finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it.
Project Description
This app hopes to encourage people to send and receive meaningful surprises when they are traveling.
The BackStory
This was for a class project examining the thorough process of user-centered design. To begin, We brainstormed for the topics we were going to explore ranging from smart home, shopping, transportation and travel. But it was travel that caught everyone's attention because we all have keen interest in traveling. Initially, we focused on documenting the sighting and also other interesting experiences during traveling. We thought that there was a break between traveling and its documentations. Therefore, we really wanted to work with the idea of travel journaling and sharing of travel experiences.
Serendipitous Message
However, our direction has shifted after more market research, we have found a lot very established mobile applications that serves the purpose of documenting travel as well as giving suggestions based on people's experiences. Therefore, a meeting was called and we wanted to shift the direction of design. After more brainstorming and personal storytelling, a "wow" moment was realized. Even though there are a lot of journaling apps, there's a break between travel experience sharing and connections between friends. Usually when people want to learn about other people's travel experiences and tips would be before they travel.But when people are at the place of interested, they are most awed by what they see and more willing to share. Therefore, the current social sharing mode does not address this break in connection.
WHO ARE THE USERS?
To address the problem, 3 research methods were carried out. 72 surveys, 11 interviews and 100 of articles. Going through more materials, we could finally make sense of our materials and come to conclusions about personas.
SCENARIO DESIGN
After initial visualization of the personas, and consolidating with our secondary research, we realize that the actual travel sharing has a disconnection with when people want to receive details about their future travel. Therefore, we are exploring the moment when people are at the places of interests and could not wait to share about their travel adventures. Also, when they are at the space, it would be really interesting to learn about what their friends or closed ones learn and explore at this space before.
Scenario Sketches
WIREFRAME PROTOTYPE
Based on user research, comparative analysis and scenario design sketches, wireframes are produced to create interactive prototypes to test our research findings and if the designs are according to customer needs.
USABILITY TESTING
Based on the wireframe prototype done, we conducted usability testing with 4 people. We had 100% completion rate and identified 13 UI design problems.
FINAL DESIGNS
After identifying UI design problems, we fixed some of the problems and tweaked the interactions based on the feedback from user testing and also our design intuitions.
REFLECTIONS
During this comprehensive user-centered design process, we have gathered lots of insights regarding how to design based on user research. Although it is a really messy process which usually means going back and forth with each stage, but being flexible towards problem solving is going to facilitate design decision making.