Overview

Being traveler on organized tours comes with a lot of obstacles in communication and organization. Tired after a long flight, exhausted from never-ending transportation and all you have to do is to remember...
When is check-in, what should I bring with me or in which room is my friend staying? Is this the way you want to spend your well-deserved holidays?

I want to dig deep into these issues and see how this can be improved.

Problem Statement

Outcomes

Vision

My Role

Coming from a different background I’ve faced the same challenge every tour. Tour guides and travel agents do their best to keep their clients informed, but sometimes it is just not enough. Information is an overwhelming and small mistake like forgetting your wallet on the bus can turn into a disaster.

The solution to provide a bridge between tour guides, travel agencies, and clients. Responsive app with interactive tour program , video calls and location share to improve overall customer experience.

POC app to capture initial users feedback, which will lead to the complete business plan and further development.

UX/UI Design
Enterpreneur

Interviews

I began by creating a survey asking users about their experience with using applications while traveling during the tours. Then I interviewed four of the survey respondents to better understand their motivations and pain points associated with traveling and organized tours. For sorting out the results I used a method called Affinity Mapping, if you are interested, you can check the interview insights here.

Information Architecture

From here I could decide what actions and features were crutial and beneficial and designed a site map around these conclusions. With drafted Sitemap, I conducted Open Card Sort through optimalworkshop.com and discovered some redundancies. The biggest findings resulted in merging two buttons in main navigation into one and renaming two different buttons as the users called them, third change was moving the settings under different sections.

Prototype

First I created 3 task flows of my main features, then I use an assortment of tools to create wireframes and prototypes at different levels of fidelity so I can cleanly and efficiently communicate my evolving design concepts. Using Balsamiq to turn my sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes helped me create a clearer image of these pages incorporating standard UI elements. I am showcasing only the low-fidelity sitemap, but you can see all three fidelity prototypes in the My Suitcase Section.

Account Creation

My Guide

Group Chat

Designing a flexible set of steps that can capture the amount of data the user feels comfortable submitting - prioritizing name, email, and password fields accompanied with slide-though onboarding.

Allowing travelers to view their tour-guide, his demographics, bio & refferences. They can always get call him either online or offline.

Communication with anyone, refined with location share, video calls & real-time map tracking. Prioritizing group chats to engage all travelers.

Usability Testing

With the Scripts in hand I’ve conducted dozen of tests and all the participants responded well to the app overall. They seemed to appreciate the simplicity of the design and found most of the functions easy to identify and complete. I’ve synthesized and analyzed the gathered recordings using Affinity Mapping and Rainbow Spreadsheet. I started exploring the copy and UI elements of the app and created preference testing to choose the main colors and the language for communication.

Design Decisions

Info on MyTour

Participants expressed that the information provided on the screen is not enough and if the text would be longer, it would make their navigation difficult. I created each day of the tour as a pop-up button,which was divided into a header with basic information and program hour by hour.

Calls Confusion

From the research, I knew, that most of the participants are not willing to buy a local sim card and they are completely fine with the hotel wifi. I also knew that they don’t usually know their tour guide's number.I solved these problems by creating the option of an online & offline call and implementing a tour guide phone number in the app, where travelers could save it to their phones. The real challenge was to differentiate online call & offline call because there is no naming convention or best practices on these. I decided to create a GuideMe call with a description & call offline. After the second round of usability testing, this solution successfully passed.

Style Guide

Creating a style guide makes it easier for me to maintain a consistent look across all my designs for a project. In organizing the guide, I work to include all the details developers may need to confidently bring the project to life. In addition, I applied the Gestalt laws and design principles into my mockups, to make it more accessible for people with visual impairments. Check, how I made the GuideMe more accessible here.

Final Mockups

Learnings & Impact

Guide Me was a great opportunity for me to comprehend what is user experience design and gain a wealth of knowledge about the field by creating a responsive web app throughout the entire design process. Because of this project, I realized the importance of “designing for people” from interviews to usability testing I have gained a lot of understanding, and without these people, my friends, Guide Me would be a completely different app.

Guide Me concept with its business model could be introduced to travel agency owner’s and investors to collect their feedback with goal of obtaining an investment and start development.