Company
Monico
Interapt
Deliverables
- User Surveys
- User Interviews
- Personas
- Journey Maps
- User Flows
- Sitemap
- Wireframes
- Prototyping
- Usability Testing
- Design System
Role
- User research
- Identified problems
- Designed solutions
- Designed wireframes & prototype mockups
- Conducted user testing
- Created a design system
Timeline
- 3 Months
Monico
Start your journey with us
The Challenge
Finally after years of the pandemic, normal traveling is resuming. So how does planning and actually traveling go again? What events are happening in other countries? Also are all the shops and restaurants i use to love still there anymore?
That is a challenge Monico aimed to address. Following the design thinking process, we aimed to develop a site and phone app that aids in planning trips or connecting with a local who can
Research on a $0 budget
For this project I didn’t have a budget I could spend on research, but because of a very specific target audience of this site I knew I couldn’t skip this step. Thankfully there were studies that others have done. CNBC had two studies, one about the overall happiness of people in correlation to traveling and the summary with most important findings was available for free on their website. I also conducted my own research and user interviews.
That is a challenge Monico aimed to address. Following the design thinking process, we aimed to develop a site and phone app that aids in planning trips or connecting with a local.
Visualizing and Understanding the user
Affinity Diagram
Analyzing the data
Returning to the affinity diagram, our team first categorized answers based on questions we asked, then grouped them into major topics. Using this map, we developed our key insights:
- - Users want to feel safe during traveling and know their belongings are secure
- - Users want to know where to go, what the current events are (local news/major celebrations).
- - Users do not see language as a challenge – they use Google translate and many locals can speak English.
- - 82% of the users (164 people) said that they would use a guide to assist them if they had access to them.
- - 44% said they preferred a person over an app for translation.
- - 42% said they preferred phone apps.
- - 33% felt that Time and Money were their biggest barriers to tour guides.
Visual Exploration
Next we moved to exploring the overall look of the site. creating mood boards helped communicate different directions we can take more vividly as the client could clearly see the impact each direction would have.
Findings
We conducted usability tests to gather first impressions on the design and functionality (6 participants). The goal of the usability test was to assess how potential users would approach five basic tasks involving learnability and identifying errors.
Participants gave an average satisfaction rating of 5/7 for each job. The most significant confusion our participants expressed was the purpose of the home page at first glance as well as not having a clear understanding on how to navigate between pages. The hamburger drop down menu was not clear for our users. We made other minor design adjustments based on our feedback to resolve this confusion.
Information Architecture
Revised Design
Next we moved to exploring the overall look of the site. Creating mood boards helped communicate different directions we can take more vividly as the client could clearly see the impact each direction would have.
Based on user feedback I took away the hamburger navigation( as seen in the previous design) as many of our users could not see it or realize to click on it as part of the navigation journey.
Changes we made Included:
- The navigation bar is now a collapsible sticky navigation bar, staying on the left. This fits people's mental models and tendency to use Z-Pattern of reading.
- The calendar and tour guide pages are on separate screens, utilizing the progressive disclosure design pattern.
- Our home page was made scrollable, advertising our service along with our main platform.
