Why another travel app? 🏄‍♀️

The idea of this travel app came from the teamwork project I was involved while taking the web design course at the Estonian Academy of Arts

🎉 Transition from team project to personal one + 💻 coding experience

I created lo-fi, mid-fi, hi-fi mockups for a landing page which are representing the Toco app. We had coding workshops as part of this course. The landing page of Toco is made using pure HTML/CSS and JS (without Bootstrap or templates) and it is also fully responsive.

You can view my project code available on GitHub

Oh, no! Why this project again? 🙀

The reason why I decided to start this project again was my wish to have such an app available for ✈️ travellers like me.

Before starting the UX research again, I consulted with 3 developers 💻 working on web and mobile applications. It became obvious that Toco project requires a team of developers and content creators and it is technically harder than I expected. But still, from my side, I can do a deeper UX research that could hypothetically be useful in the future development of Toco app.

📍 If you are interested to learn about the whole research process please do not hesitate to contact me

Why Gen Z and Millennials? 😺

In the first version of the research I did during my course at the Estonian Academy of Art, we were not focused on any specific age for our target audience. This time I shifted my focus towards the youngest generations.

Millennials and Generation Z need a simple and quick way to plan their travel and find unique and favourite among locals spots to visit them. These places need to be safe and travellers need to have an opportunity to ask clarifying questions from the 🗺 travel community.

Millennials and Generation Z travel more than the previous generations and want to explore cities by feeling like locals without losing comfort.

📝 Research plan and interview notes

For user interviews, I found guys who travel 🧳 a lot for different reasons together with their partners or alone. All interviews were conducted using video calls and included a brief, interview and debriefing.

BACKGROUND:
The travel industry has radically changed after 2008 when startups like Airbnb and Uber were founded. The rise of low-cost airlines in the 2010s also played a significant role in changing ✈️ the travel industry.

Nowadays travellers can easily find a safe taxi from an airport to an apartment. Once at the place of their 🏡 accommodation, they don't need to go through a tedious hotel check-in process. Most of the apartments on Airbnb offer a self-check-in box 🔑 service and by the time our traveller is done taking bath, local food 🥡 delivery service is right behind the door with a tasty lunch.

Millennials and Generation Z appreciate comfort 😸 and feeling that they become locals at the moment their plane lands in a new city. The only thing that was missing in this "comfort + local experience" combo is an app that would help to find suitable and targeted places recommended and verified by locals.

🔍 Affinity map & Findings

After conducting user interviews and transcribing the main points of the interviews into an interview notes section, I started to create an affinity map.

Each interview has its colour (yellow, orange or green). I wrote on sticky notes the most important points (and I also summarised some user points). In some cases, I also drew 🖍 to get a better understanding of each user goals. The next step was to consider how to divide user points. I highlighted 6 main user motives that they expressed during interviews:

1. Local experience 🍜 (local's food, local places)
2. Transport 🛵 (renting a car, public transport, troubles with public transport)
3. Researching the trip (paper map 🗺️ or google maps; research about dangerous places)
4. Tickets 🎫 and discounts (uses ISIC card, buys tickets before going to a museum)
5. Travel services (rents rooms 🛋️ in hotels, uses Airbnb only, uses TripAdvisor)
6. Travel behaviour 👭 (travels alone or with a partner, chooses between comfort and price)

Competitors research 👩🏼‍💻

During the research, I analysed more than 20 competitors in the travel field. My flow was pretty simple but time-consuming. I downloaded every 📱 travel app available in English, I went through sign-in/sign up processes, explored all app features, made screenshots and took notes for creating Plus/Delta chart.

📝 Analysis

After collecting all the data I created an affinity map. Using the affinity map I identified 🔍 what features a hypothetical Toco app could have.

Travellers who will use the Toco app 👩‍🦰

The main differences between primary and secondary personas:
1. An average of income 💶
2. Solo 🏄‍♀️ travelling or travelling with a partner
3. Time of staying in a city 🏡

Kätlin Kask needs a way to check the most important information before taking the trip and to plan to visit local's places without huge effort because she has no time for planing her trips and at the same time she is on a tight budget, but she needs to feel safe and comfortable during her trips.

🗂 Card-sorting & MoSCoW prioritisation

For feature prioritisation, I chose a MoSCoW model as I used it a lot for my freelance projects and I found this type of prioritisation map to be the most easy-to-use and easy-to-read type of map.

Card sorting research took 2 days and it involved 8 participants (from Europe, the UK and the US; generation Z and millennials). Participants had an option to sort cards into 3 columns: 😺 must-have, 👌 nice to have and 🗑 rubbish. They also had a choice to keep some cards unsorted.

📍 Card sorting research shows what most of the respondents would like to see in the TOCO travelling app:
1. Section 🥂 "Restaurants recommended by locals"
2. Filter places 💶 by budget
3. Section ❤️ "Saved places"
4. Section ⛲️ "Spots nearby"
5. Filter places by topic
6. Section 🤫 "Untold rules"
7. Section 🎡 "Things to do"
8. Function "Add friend to your trip"

📝 Findings Overview

In short, the purpose of this project is to give enough information for users about places approved by locals, to simplify user's 🔍 research for their travel and improve their experience during the trip.

The main objectives of this project are:
💎1. Find a way to create a simple and user-friendly travel app with recommendations approved or made by locals
💎2. Minimise the time ⏰ that users spend on research (before and during a trip)
💎3. Find a way to keep users informed about dangerous 😰 places in the city
💎4. Find a way to create a travel community focused on alternative travelling

Lo-fi prototypes and testing 📱

For creating lo-fi prototypes I used Procreate app and 🖊 Apple pencil. I uploaded my ready-made sketches into the Marvel app for prototyping and the following user testing. The next step was user testing. During the testing, I took notes and I also had a debriefing with a respondent.

For the first test, I asked the same people who participated in user interviews to test the first prototype made from app sketches and prototyped in Marvelapp. 2 participants tested prototype during our zoom call 🖥 (they shared their screens) and with 1 participant we meet in place

📍Results:
1. All participants used the "skip" button
2. No one of them understood what was "locals QA" ❔ section about
3. All participants were happy about the ❤️ "like" button and feed etc.

Hi-fi prototype and testing 👩🏼‍💻

For the hi-fi prototype, I used UI guideline 🎨 that I created during the web design course at The Estonian Academy of Arts. For working on a visual design I used Figma as well as I used that tool for UX research documentation. For prototyping, I used❕Figma Mirror tool that completely covered up all prototyping/testing needs.

For the second test, I asked the same people who participated in user interviews to test the second prototype 📱 (UI screens prototyped in Figma and for testing, we used Figma mirror). 1 participant tested prototype during our zoom call and with 1 participant we meet in place️

📍Results:
1. All the participants used the "skip" button
2. The whole process is clear. The interface is intuitive
3. Logo and some titles were invisible because of iPhone bangs etc.

🎉Project afterwords🎉

For me, it was a kind of crash test of the idea and I enjoyed it so much. By the end of the research and design processes, I'm still sure that there is no direct competitor for my idea and this app could become popular among the youngest generation of travellers. Maybe 2020/2021 are not the best years in the travel industry 😷 so, for now, I have no option, but to put this idea on the back burner.