About Diversion
Diversion offers a personalized list of cities the user is interested in, and is pre-populated with suggestions for the user to draw inspiration from for each location. For each location, travelers can store information on the destination- suggestions, images, itinerary info, web links etc. This will help the user to collect all their travel information in one place. The product needs a simple and easy way of sharing and collaborating on collected information so that users can plan trips together or easily send others their suggestions. The product should also allow the user to view their travel itinerary in a calendar format. When composing an itinerary, users can add sights from the information collected onto the systems calendar. The product also should allow the user to reference their activities by location. Items from their pool of information and from the calendar can be located and marked as important on the systems navigation so that users can visualize getting from one place to the next efficiently.
The Challenge
It is time consuming to plan for travel without turning to multiple sources to find and verify information, and capturing that information to amalgamate it in one place is even more challenging. The problem for our users is too much disparate information. They should be able to condense their knowledge and recommendations into one application in an intuitive way so that users can reference their research on the go.
Diversion aims to solve these problems by
1. Creating collections of information on destinations of interest
2. Storing all related booking info for a trip or trip planning
3. Allowing users to share plans and create trips together
4. Import and export travel plans
My Role
I created the Product Design - User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) . I conducted customer discovery, interviews, and testing, and analyzed and researched product market fit.
Primary Tasks
1. Customers Insights & Ideation 2. Building the Project Vision 3. Planning and scope definition 4. User Experience and Interaction Design 5. User Interface Design
Design Tools
Design Process
Before thinking about design at all, I rounded up a few of my most travel oriented friends and sat down for a little fireside chat. Interviewing potential users about their challenges and strategies for solving them is always, ALWAYS the critical first step, and since I LOVE to travel myself, I picked up a ton of great insights.
I discovered from friends that some key challenges in planning travel were:
- Disparate Information
- Endless online searches
- Effectively Planning a trip with somebody else especially in light of the mass of information
- Organizing travel plans and itinerary
Knowing that these were things I could solve with an app, I got to work
App Map
From these initial sketches, I create a clean comprehensive app map. The app map tells me where everything should go and how it should all be linked together, and I clean it up so that I can reference it quickly and easily while designing my wireframes
The app map defines the key user flows
Concept
Drawing upon the collective brilliance of those I interviewed, I sketched out a quick solution and made a prototype from it. The first prototype is a quick and dirty sketch that I used for rapid (like reeeaaalllly rapid) prototyping. From there I cleaned it up a bit testing the usability with my volunteers.
Setting the Mood
I had two distinct styles in mind when creating the UI for diversion. The first was a simpler and elegant style, the second was colorful and creative. Since I loved them both I decided to mock up a few screens and put the vote to my volunteer testers!
Defining the Brand Through Design
The essential question from here, is what kind of company does Diversion want to be? We loved both the styles, so in the end tested both and found best response with our colorful mockups. The app is currently in design, and we cant wait to share the finished product!!!
Stay Tuned <3