Timeline
2 Week Sprint| 4 UX Designers
My Key Roles
UX & UI Designer
Tools Used
Figma, Miro, Photoshop
Our Goal :
The goal of our research is to understand how we might improve the travel experience for solo women travelers.
Additionally, we set out to understand how we can make female solo travel as safe is possible, while remaining an enjoyable, social experience.
The Problem Space:
Women would feel more comfortable traveling alone and meeting up with others if they had a tool that prioritized their safety while abroad.
Some of our assumptions:
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Women would prefer to travel with other women instead of men.
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Many women opt out of solo travel due to lack of resources and safety.
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Women feel unsafe traveling alone.
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Women would like someone to do certain activities with when traveling solo.
Initial Problem Statement:
We see that women solo travelers generally feel unsafe traveling alone. Our target audience, (women solo travelers) need a tool that will prioritize their safety when traveling solo.
How might we help solo-female travelers meet people and book their itineraries in a safe way?
Our UX Process
Market Research, User Research,
Deliver
Define
Design
Discover
Final Hi-Fidelity Designs, Iterations, Metrics, Next Steps
User Interviews, Usability Testing
Design Studio, Feature Prioritization, MoSCoW Mapping, User Testing
User Interviews
Once we had our goal of research and our scope of work established, we were able to recruit users for interviews. We determined our target audience to be women who have traveled solo before, and plan to do so again in the future.
After completed our interviews, we used affinity mapping to synthesize our notes, and create “I statements” and insights. This helped us to find common trends within the data.
"I want to meet people, but I'm always cautious. "
"I was almost pick-pocketed in Greece! "
What did we learn?
We were able to derive these key findings from the interview process:
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Women want to meet people, but are cautious at first.
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Women are not always sure what resources are available, in the case of an emergency.
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Women want to verify who they meet when traveling.
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Women enjoy participating in various activities, when abroad.
Meet our Target User, Tiffany
Using the insights we've gathered, we were able to create an archetype that embodies our target audience.
Validating our Initial Problem
Using the insights and key findings from our research synthesis, we determined that our initial problem statement was validated, although some assumptions were disproven. We originally assumed that women felt generally unsafe when traveling solo, but most women felt empowered. They enjoyed having agency, and doing what they please. This led us to our new problem statement to solve for.
Women are typically open to meeting people while traveling, but are hesitant at first due to safety concerns.
As a result, Tiffany doesn't meet as many people as she'd like to while traveling solo.
How might we help women like Tiffany connect with other travelers abroad while avoiding potentially dangerous situations?
Designing The VoyageHER App
What Insights Led Us to our Design Decisions?
Using the insights that were gathered from out interviews and data, we were able to pull out key features that would later become critical design decisions.
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Women are typically open to meeting people abroad, but are cautious first. >>
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​A “Safety Tips” tab, that gives you general and Covid-19 safety tips for whatever country you are in.
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Women are open to meeting people on an app but want the option to verify them beforehand. >>
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The ability to see if a person is “verified" on the app, as well as reading their complete bio, and past trips.
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Women enjoy participating in a wide variety of exciting group activities. >>
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​The ability to book and locate various travel excursions within the app. | Within the app, you can see what travelers are going on the same excursions as you.
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The safety resources in other countries isn't always known or readily available to travelers. >>
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​An “Emergency tools” tab, so you know the proper numbers to contact in a dire situation. | A tab for “safe spaces”, so you can locate nearby hospitals or police stations.
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Design Studio
We conducted Feature Prioritization, MoSCow Mapping and an enriching design studio session to determine some key features we knew we wanted to include in our final design.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Using the key features that we determined from our design sketches, we were able to create a mid-fidelity mockup of the VoyageHer app for user testing.
Usability Testing- Round 1
Befor continuing to a high fidelity design, we conducted user testing on our mid fidelity prototype to see how people experience our current design. Users received a scenario , and four tasks to follow. We captured easiness ratings, time in tasks, and overall feedback.
5 Users
4 Timed Tasks
Meaurements
What Insights Did we Gather from user testing?
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Some users took longer than desired to navigate to the emergency call pages, the app would benefit from an emergency page that stands out from the rest of navigation.
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Because the notifications icon was mistaken for emergency feature by multiple users, we will need to remove it all together, or replace it for something else.
3
Few users navigated to the “map” page to search for nearby travelers, so there needs to be an alternate way to approach the screen.
4
Some users clicked on hamburger menu, so content needs to be added to it, or removed all-together.
Usability Testing- Round 2
Once we iterated on our design based on our first round of user testing, we ran a second round of testing on our hi fidelity designs, to see where we can further improve our design.
6 Users
4 Timed Tasks
Meaurements
Our UX Impact: How We Problem Solved Through Design
With this round of prototyping & designing based on the previous user testing, we were able to see positive improvements of users’ reactions and navigation of the mobile application.
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There was a 20% increase in success for the third task, meaning that adding an arrow to locate travelers was effective.
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There was a 30% increase in success for the 4th task, meaning that removing the hamburger menu alleviated a lot of confusion for users.
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Although it may take a few more seconds to achieve some tasks, they are doing with more direct success.
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Measuring Metrics with the Google Heart Framework
As a team, we decided to use the Google Heart Framework to see the positive impact that our application had with users. This is another way to measure our success, and where we can improve.
What's Next for the VoyageHer App?
Some Next Steps For VoyageHer Include:
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Continue to keep inclusivity top of mind (Female bodied/Non Binary/Transgender)
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Prototype more locations (Both domestic and International)
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Add social accounts to user profiles to further verify them ( Extra level of security and safety)
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Add more features to our app and test them (Ghost feature and toggle off button to hide location)
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Another round of iterations and user testing
