Tripster

Timeline

4 Weeks
November - December 2019

Project type

Personal Project

My role

UX Design

Tools

Adobe Suite
InVision Studio

Skills

UX Research, UX Concept, UX Design, Interaction Design

Outcome

wireframe concept, interaction prototype, and visual design

Tripster is a personalized

travel guide application

01 Overview

I'm really passionate about traveling and wanted to dig deeper into Invision Studio. That's why I decided to work for fun on Tripster as a personal project. Tripster was designed as a self-learning travel guide. The main goal was to create an all in one travel companion, which would enhance the trip organization process with truly personalized travel recommendations.

What should we do now?

Being in a foreign place

02 Problem

After my graduation, I've been over a month in China for a mandarin course. During my free time, I ran into the problem, that I was in a foreign country with endless sightseeing options, but didn't know which ones would fit my interests. As always I then decided to go for the top attractions, which were sometimes very crowded. I wondered if there is a way to enhance the travel experience and decided to work on a personalized travel guide.

Just as a tip - don't plan a shanghai trip during golden week

The way to go

User-Centered Design

03 Process

The development of tripster is based on the user-centered design process. It is an iterative design process for interactive systems. It put's the future users at the center of the project and designs the system around their specific needs.

Building the foundation

Research and Analysis

04 Analysis

The analysis phase intended to uncover the needs and frustrations of the user. I conducted a competitive analysis of tripster's direct competitors in the travel application industry. Additionally, I held four qualitative user interviews and created an affinity map of their key responses to organize and synthesize them.

Competitive analysis

Affinity map of interview responses

What the Fact

Analysis Insights

After conducting the user interviews and analyzing the gathered data, I was able to categorize the insights into these 3 categories.

Finding a way

Creating an idea

05 Ideation

Creating the main user persona helped me to make decisions about defining, prioritizing and personalizing content and features for the users. Furthermore, it was important to create an end to end information architecture and real-life use-cases, on which the upcoming usability tests are based upon.

Persona Stella

Information architecture

Use case diagram

Let's get it started

Building the concept

06 Conception

After brainstorming and scribbling out the first ideas, I started off with pen and paper and created low-fidelity wireframes. Reviewing everything in quick paper prototyping sessions allowed me to explore and evaluate different ideas in a short time. I digitalized everything and created the use-case wireframes. Finally, I put everything together in the first click prototype.

Scribbles and paper wireframes

paper wireframes

Explore nearby use case as wireframe flow

Ask the users

They know best

07 Evaluation

I asked 4 participants to test the prototype's usability. They were given three different scenarios, each with one use case to complete. The participants should use the thinking aloud method and were recorded throughout the test. The main goal was to identify potential problems, receive qualitative user feedback and gain valuable insights for further development.

usability testing

usability testing - interaction prototype

Let's put it together

Creating the visual design

09 Design

After refining the wireframes according to the user feedback, I began thinking about how the tripster application would look and feel. I created mood boards with different tripster brand wordings, design influences, and interfaces. The goal was to shape the first idea in which way the design is heading. After several iterations, I fleshed out the style guide, visually designed several screens and created a motion example within Invision Studio.

Mood adjectives

Mood references

Mood interfaces

Presentation time

Final result

10 Results

Teamwork

= better work

11 Lessons learned

Of course, working alone has the benefit of shaping everything the way you want to. But I really enjoy working in organized teams. Working on a project together in frequent discourse with your teammates enhances the flourishment of new ideas, brings people together and creates social bonds. This is really something that would have brought me personally and also the tripster concept even further.

Still curious?

Check out some of my other projects