Herd Travel App
Research // UX Design // UI Design - 5 week project
Groups planning to travel together struggle with budgeting, selecting and paying for group accommodations. The responsibility and large cost often falls on a single member of the group causing stress and financial burden.
The Problem:
Herd was designed to streamline the group accommodation booking process through seamless collaboration. The app allows for each person or party to participate in the process and for the final cost to be split upon final selection.
The Solution:
Research and Definition
Proto-Persona & User Interviews
When my partner and I were tasked with building an iOS travel app for the modern times, we found a common interest in exploring group travel. The process began by proto-persona around potential users as a solid starting point for where to begin.
Next, we wrote a research plan in hopes of discovering the topic's pain points. We met with 6 individuals total, transcribed our conversations, and scheduled a meeting to examine the results.
Interview Quotes
Matthew - Age 27
“I would say managing expenses a little bit easier could definitely take stress out of keeping track of everything.”
Kassie - Age 29
“Most of the difficulties I’ve encountered while traveling with a group are aligning on budget expectations.”
Sorting our findings
After our interviews we wrote out our conversation insights on sticky notes and organized them into a affinity diagram. We found that groups typically have a hard time sharing the responsibility of selecting and paying for accommodations while traveling. Every user expressed an interest in traveling with their loved ones, but had previously had a poor experience around accommodations. We decided that this was the specific topic we wanted to explore.
User Persona
With our research synthesized a bit further, we created a user persona for the project, Wendy White.
Wendy is a young professional that loves to experience new places with her friends, but is oftentimes troubled by the planning process. She prioritizes her relationships and travel over material things.
Problem Statement
Travelers in a group need a better way to book trip accommodations. This is a problem because individual travelers needs and preferences complicate the selection process. Furthermore, this is also a problem because a single traveler is often left with the significant financial burden of the accommodation.
Ideation Examples
During the ideation process for this project we determined that we want our product, which we have named HERD, to allow users to set budgets, collaborate on accommodation selection and pay their share up front. Our user research pointed out that most travelers were accustomed to using Airbnb or VRBO and a competitor analysis of the two gave us a good indication of what they do well, and where they fall short relating to group travel. They also share a similar architecture, which gave us a starting point for creating our wireframes.
Lo-fi Wireframes
User Testing
A round of user tests brought our attention to a few points of interest with the lo-fi wireframe. Firstly, the “crew” section received the most amount of feedback. Users noted confusion finding the listed budget and chat feature. Although the original design was meant to share a wishlist of features, it didn’t provide any of the important information surrounding the trip.
Secondly, the icons we initially chose were not 100% clear to each user. Opting for more traditional icons, such as the magnifying glass, paired with icon names would help new users navigate the app.
Mockups
Prototype & Final Thoughts
When it was time to create a hi-fi prototype I was interested in making a simplistic, strong and playful design choices for the app. I wanted it to feel modern and in line with something Wendy, a professional millennial, was drawn to using.
This project was the first UX/UI project I ever worked on, and it was ambitious to say the least. My last week of the project was spent applying some of the new UI skills I had learned in class.
If given more time, I would have been interested in designing the payment system and some of the additional features the app will need to work for it’s users.