TravelTails
Timeline: 4 Weeks
Role: User Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma, Miro, Procreate, Adobe Express
Platform: iOS
TravelTails app is a travel companion for pet parents to find pet friendly stays and activities tailored to their pets' needs. The application is backed by verified reviews and also helps travelers find reliable pet care supplies, making their travels more memorable.
PROBLEM SPACE
Online research shows that the pandemic has led to an increase in the number of households with pets. More and more pet owners are now looking for places to travel along with their fur babies, and for longer durations(thanks to remote work!). While all of this sounds exciting, pet parents face an abundance of issues in finding a suitable pet friendly vacation rental. Their problems are not just limited to finding pet friendly places but also in finding activities tailored for their pets. The stress of identifying good pet supply stores and reliable emergency care for them during travel is also a major concern.
INITIAL RESEARCH
LET’S BEGIN
Online research shows that the pandemic has led to an increase in the number of households with pets. More and more pet owners are now looking for places to travel along with their fur babies, and for longer durations(thanks to remote work!). Pet-friendly accommodation is a growing industry trend. While all of this sounds exciting, pet parents face an abundance of issues in finding a suitable pet friendly vacation rental.
The research showed that
a) Travelers who own pets spend hours finding pet friendly hotels and activities around where their pets can be involved.
b) They often worry about their pets' safety and needs in new unknown destinations as they travel.
And more importantly,
“There are so many ways to plan your travels. Why don’t they apply to all kinds of pets!”
I would like to enhance the experience of travelling with pets by ensuring reliable and updated pet friendly accommodation and activity information, backed by trustworthy reviews is easily available for pet parents. I believe that along with this, providing pet care information and streamlining all the information related to a specific travel will be key factors in the success of the app. Ultimately, I hope to cater to all kinds of pets and provide opportunities for pet parents to journal their next wonderful travel tail!
USER RESEARCH
As a first step towards finding a possible solution, I performed extensive User Research to understand more about my users and their pain points.
SURVEY
Using a carefully crafted user survey on Google Forms that was advertised across different social media platforms, important considerations and paint points of traveling with pets were collected. This helped narrow down on users who would fit the TravelTails user profile.
INTERVIEW SUMMARY
After reviewing the survey results I conducted interviews to probe further and better understand my target users. Using the results, I was able to come up with a structure for my interview and identify key questions to ask. I was fortunate enough to have found a diverse set of pet-parents aged 18–55 to interview and comprehend how they feel about planning travels and finding pet friendly places.
QUOTES FROM SOME USERS
“I often travel with my wife and our dog. I am mostly worried about his needs and safety concerns when we travel. I wish finding pet care facilities while we travel was simpler.”
“I take months to plan my trip with my 2 cats. There's not many resources out there about cat friendly places and it's challenging to accommodate all their requirements and plan a trip.”
“The biggest challenge is to find a place that is truly pet friendly. It's disheartening to see how people treat the poor babies.”
KEY INSIGHTS
After some really insightful user interviews, I was able to review my notes to recapitulate the content into 6 main themes :
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS & MARKET GAP
My goal here was to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competitor apps and sites to learn more about features which were done well and also identify gaps in the existing solutions. Here's a summary of the strengths and weaknesses I put together of the Direct and Indirect Competitors for my app.
PERSONA & USER JOURNEY MAP
The Research phase so far showed most generic needs and pains of the users. Although there were specific and diverse needs for each user, I needed a way to create reliable and realistic representations of my key audience segments for reference. For this purpose, I tried to encompass the various insights and the quantitative user research into a common pattern to sketch out a user persona with characteristics of a typical user of my app.
IDEATION
USER FLOW
Before I could jump into designing the app, it was important to figure out what path users would take when they use the app. For this purpose, I first sketched out possible user flows on a piece of paper based on the insights gained during the research and the ideation process about users' needs. Later, I digitally rendered it on Miro.
Each of my user flows underwent several rounds of iterations with the goal of increasing the efficiency of the interface in allowing the user to perform their task.
TASK - Book a pet friendly stay and find a pet friendly activity around from the popped up suggestions.
CONCEPT SKETCHES
With an understanding of the research I had done so far with emphasis on the pain points that users still faced, I took my first step towards visualizing the app by sketching out a few screens.
I sketched out rough interfaces of all my screens to be able to see it as a whole, which would help come up with basic wireframes. The sketches helped me better identify interactions that had to be intuitive and those that needed to be highlighted. They also helped me think about content structure and designing seamless navigation across various pages.
WIREFRAMES
The rough sketches were translated into wireframes, a visual guide that would form the skeletal framework of the app and help me determine the structure and navigation patterns of the platform. The simplicity of the wireframes allowed me to quickly iterate and test ideas at a rapid pace without being distracted by the appearance.
TESTING SUMMARY AND ITERATIONS
With the help of 7 users within my target demographics, I was able to obtain feedback that helped me make improvements as I progressed. The overall goal was to provide an optimal user experience. Here are some of the key iterations based on testing:
PROTOTYPE
UI STYLE GUIDE
I chose the name "TravelTails" as a wordplay on "tales" with the intention of combining the two most important aspects addressed by the app, “traveling” with “pets”. Apart from conveying the purpose, I felt the name aptly showcased my commitment towards making sure pets are at the forefront in every consideration and aspect of the app. This ideology had to be reflected in the look and feel of the app too!
THE FINAL PRODUCT
FIGMA PROTOTYPE
CONCLUSION
LEARNINGS
Working on a real life problem that I actually faced with my friends helped me push myself further in the pursuit of a better user experience. I feel extremely grateful to have experienced the entire iterative design process first-hand. Some of the learnings I took away from this exercise :
There’s always room for more iterations: Apart from improving user journeys, frequent testing and incorporating the feedback into my designs helped me get better at the underlying tools I was using too! I was getting faster and faster at incorporating feedback!
Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture: It was easy to get distracted by lots of orthogonal ideas for features and add-ons as I started making improvements and playing around with my prototype. I am glad that I was quickly able to identify and overpower the distractions and not lose sight of my users and their needs.
Trust yourself: Throughout the process, there were a lot of times where I wasn’t sure if my choice was right. By sticking to my gut and having pulled through, I realised that it is okay to challenge the status-quo and come up with a design that differs from a top rated app on App Store. While it is important to thoughtfully reuse design patterns, It is also important to ensure that your design caters to your users and is backed by reason. There is definitely no “one size fits all” when it comes to design, so feel free to experiment and let the user feedback guide your way.
NEXT STEPS
I have identified three key tasks to take my project closer to life:
Improve Features: Even though I am quite satisfied with how the iterations helped me polish a lot of features and fix some flaws in their usability, I still see scope of improvement in some of them. For instance, I would like to provide an easier way to filter through all the comments to select comments that applicable to and/or are posted by users with a specific kind of pet. Taking it one step further, I would like to design a system that auto generates top tags based on the comments and shows one-word cards that the users can quickly use to filter comments.
Additional User Flows and Journeys: To improve the overall experience of travel, I would like to also build new user flows that help connect travelers. This could be in the form of groups that travelers can create with their friends or a complete social network for users to connect to other pet parents and make travel plans with!
More Testing : I would like to also advertise my prototype across various platforms in hopes of accumulating more feedback from user testing. I think this will help identify any drawbacks in the current state of my design, further optimize my user flows and also help me prioritize new features and user flows.
