New Horizons
The Perfect Travel Companion
Overview
Start with WHY
The process of planning, organizing and experiencing a vacation can differ for us all. However, we all have one thing in common; we don’t want it to bring us more stress. Let’s make planning, booking, and organizing a trip, an exciting part of your vacation.
New Horizons is a travel booking and management company who want to make vacationing stress free. Their platform accomplishes this by leveraging machine learning and utilizing cross platform applications on commonly used devices.
The Problem
The Solution
The stress of booking a vacation can interfere with a user’s relaxation.
A handy dandy app that helps you book and manage your vacation and also contains a built in travel companion.
User Research
Interviews
I started with interviews to see how people plan, organize, and experience travel.
What I discovered was, like people, travel planning varies greatly. However, budget, culture and rejuvenation seemed to be the most common similarities that dictate where people travel, how they travel, and why they travel.
Incites
Affinity Diagram
Multiple interviewees felt it essential to be away from their electronic devices, in order to feel as though they could re-charge.
Multiple interviewees expressed budget was the biggest factor for where they travelled and what they did on their travels.
Dissecting the main points interviewees talked about led to the creation of affinity diagrams to best get a feel for each user.
Websites/Apps
Transportation
Mother Nature
Experience
Taking the information from above we saw that we needed a similar experience to current travel apps. However it seemed like we needed to add some sort of organizational aspect that other apps lacked.
We also needed to make sure we were offering alternate forms of transportation. Lastly the app needed to receive information about the users vacation, so that we could give the user the best travel companion depending on what the user wanted.
A handy dandy app to not only help you book and manage your vacation with ease but a built in travel companion.
New Horizons keeps you in the loop of events going on around you, wherever you are traveling to. It also reminds you to keep the phone in your pocket as much as possible so you can experience what is going on around you.
Meet Alex
One of the user personas that was created in reflection of the research and data received.
User Scenario
Alex is a workaholic, graphic designer, who loves to get away from their busy life. Their only problem is time.
They want an app that suggests future travel destinations and experiences based on previous data that is logged by the user.
While on vacation Alex wants to spend less time on their phone and more time experiencing the place they have travelled to. So they want notifications telling them:
about cool events happening nearby, that align with their interests
to take a second to breathe
to put the phone down, when it's time embrace their vacation.
Storyboard
To iterate on the concept we ran Alex through a hypothetical story that would allow us to narrow down the features needed for New Horizons.
Alex wants to go on vacation but can never seem to find the time needed to arrange it.
But what is this? An ad for “New Horizons”, Alex is intrigued.
Alex goes on the site, creates an account with their Apple login and answers a few questions about themselves.
Once the profile is complete, Alex puts in their budget and BAM! All the holiday destinations they could want are there, and more!
Next thing Alex knows, they’re on their vacation!
And while on vacation Alex receives notifications about cool events that align with their interests in the area, just to make sure they never miss out.
The storyboard and user flow helped us realize that our app has the potential to take a lot of stress out of planning a vacation if we got to know our users on sign-up.
To do this, we’d implement a questionnaire that gathers a user’s vacation priorities based on priority destinations, favourite experiences/activities, and personal budget. This would enable New Horizons to calculate, find, and present the best vacation options available to our users.
In line with our research, we knew that budget was a huge factor in the activities and destination selected for a vacation, so this is what we leaned into.
After we concluded that the focus should be on the sign-up process, we got to work on sketches based off our user flows and research.
Wireframes
Iterate. Iterate. Iterate!
After the conclusion to focus on the sign-up process we got to work on sketches based off our user flows and research.
Enhance
Easy to follow step-by-step onboarding.
The stepping-stone progress tracker to help a user know where they are in the process.
Liked the easy to read, big buttons.
Iterate
Felt the “adding interests” and “adding travel locations” were too small and condensed.
Users were confused at first with the summary page before final profile creation. (When questioned, users had a hard time differentiating if their confusion was brought about by the order of the step or the fidelity of the prototype).
We decided to move forward knowing we would use A&B testing to figure out where the users confusion was coming from.
Once we got a user flow and general layout sketched we moved quickly to producing the first prototype so we could under go user testing.
Finishing Touches
HiFi
Combining our UI Style Guide with our enhanced prototype we created something looking like this.
Next Steps
The next steps for New Horizons will be to secure more funding in future seed rounds so that they can build out the website, apps, and backend.
If you have more questions about the project please contact me.
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