Ramble.

Many travelers seek a getaway from their current environment to dive into the unknown and explore difficult cultures. And in this day of social media That is what prompted us to build a product that allows travelers to be in control of their safety and immersing themselves in a different culture by providing insights to acclimate themselves. But how did we get there?

Hypothesis

As avid travelers who have individually experienced moments regarding uncertainty on a trip, we hypothesized that travelers find it hard to have accurate and local safety knowledge in real time.

With this in mind, we made the following assumptions:

• Travelers are not sure what safety information is accurate or biased.
• Travelers lack up to date and relevant safety information about their destination.
• Travelers use multiple sources to create their own knowledge base on safety.

We then asked, “How might we provide travelers with accurate and relevant safety information?”, and set out to identify broader trends grounded in the experiences of seasoned travelers.

Persona

We pulled the key insights and from the user interviews and the trends found in the Affinity map to form our persona.

User Journey

We created a Journey Map to walk a mile in Norma’s shoes as she traveled from her hostel to a local eatery to better understand her emotional journey.

The User Journey provided our team with insights that shaped our key features going forward into the design process. We concluded that we wanted to prioritize key features such as navigation, user feedback with real time alerts, education on cultural norms, and local news updates.

Revised problem Statement

Our user research confirmed that travelers find it difficult to find updated information in real-time. We also learned that travelers leverage their past experience, close connections, and general word-of-mouth to inform their exploration and safety precautions; for most travelers, word-of-mouth included interactions with other hostel-goers, as well as a myriad of digital sources including Reddit, Instagram, and general Google searches.

Based these additional insights, we revised the scope of our project to the following:

Design Studio

With our feature priorities in mind, we held a design studio session to democratically brainstorm and ideate on how we might translate written features into functional design.

A few strong, actionable ideas emerged from our Design Studio session, including:

• Alerts on a map
• Feedback on a route
• Gallery of nearby places to explore
• Alerting a loved one
• Emergency contacts
• Bottom tab navigation elements laid out from most broad to most local

Design

After completing the design studio and coming up with our low fidelity sketches, our team was ready to move forward to building our mid fidelity mobile wireframes.

Mid-Fi Prototype

After the Mid-Fidelity wireframes were finalized we conducted usability testing to learn how well our product ran. There were four scenarios and tasks that we focused on to help guide our user through our app. After the test we gathered time on task, indirect or direct success, click rate, and each participant’s easiness rating to measure the overall success rate.

Scorecard round 1

Key insights

• Users find subtleties within our categories of cultural norms
• Wording dining (food/cutlery etiquette) vs cultural clothing to differentiate
• Some users evaluate route based on their personal safety preferences, while others evaluate instinctively
• Redefine the use of the “fastest” route and why someone would take it — indicating maybe what kind of caution there might be on this route

Overview

For the final stage of our design process we created a high fidelity prototype from the insights gained from the mid-fidelity usability testing. We built out our features entirely in Figma and included the name which is Ramble. We implemented brand colors that reflected the core values of our product. Our goal was to create the needed changes to improve on the usability and overall experience of our product.

Takeaways
Here we updated the arrangement of the routes from fastest to slowest. We did this from learning most users expect the fastest route to be prioritized as it follows the current functionality of maps.

1. 1. We increased the “change route” button to allow for users to locate this option more easily as we found that users were missing this feature during the usability tests
2. 2. We increased the pop-out box as well because of what we addressed previously. The bottom bar changed to better reflect the current functionality of Google Maps

Figma

Usability testeing 2

Overview

We learned that users identified the need to have this resource because of its ability to provide safety alerts and insights about cultural norms while traveling abroad. It’s a tool that empowers users to feel safe.

Method
After the hi-fidelity wireframe was created we ran usability testing on five participants. We used the same three tasks from the mid-fidelity wireframes that allowed the participants to engage with the key functions of the website. We conducted this over Zoom so that we can take notes as the users who completed the task. The quantitative data we tracked to measure improvements was the time on task, and the amount of clicks. The qualitative data we tracked was the comments and the participants behavior.

Tasks

Tasks between the initial and second rounds of usability testing remained the same.

Key Takeaways

• Utilize the local customs page first to allow user to explore their new destination
• Include the cultural norms for dining directly on the arrival page
• Positive phrasing for safety routes
• Instead of showing a route not to go down, introduce a new alert a few meters ahead.

Next steps

The next steps for our product would include updating our design with the insights we gained from our second round of usability testing. From there we would run another round of usability testing to learn the success of the changes made. Part of this process has already begun as we began implementing some of the insights from our second round of usability testing into the functionality of our design. We visualized how an alert would appear once activated by a user. We included a stronger brand presence throughout the design by tightening up our brand, and we included more Apple iOS visualization.