My role was to oversee the entirety of the project.
As a project manager, I planned our sprints, deliverables, and roadmap.
As a designer, I provided feedback to the team with UX insights & design solutions. I also developed the design library, created our Figma prototypes, and finalized screens for dev hand-off.
We hypothesized that users wanted a personalized itinerary with enough flexibility to edit on the go.
We needed to learn about our users’ habits and mental models when they plan a trip.
Through competitive research, we found that apps seemed to have too many steps. We held an ideation workshop to brainstorm who we thought our users were, their pain points, priorities, and key tasks. Then, we tested these assumptions with real users.
Our surveys and interviews told us to redirect our goals to focus on collaboration.
Our users ranged from being well-organized to never planning until the day of their trip.
However, planners tend to be the group's main organizers, making decisions based on a group vote and the distance between locations. They did not use a specific planning app and instead used:
- Phone notes
- Excel sheets
- Word documents
We discovered the best way to handle collaboration through testing.
At first, we envisioned suggestions to be just simply a list.
Through testing, we renamed the heading ‘Suggestions’ to ‘Group Suggestions’ and organized locations by category accordions. Our users loved this!
I developed a design library to optimize dev handoff.
Our app was completely built with components made by our front-end developers. Creating a design library was necessary for dev handoff and updating our designs quickly as we tested our designs with our users.
I prototyped all our screens for usability tests & promotional content.
It was important to include microinteractions that added delight and increased the understanding of our user’s tasks. Watch our promotional video, which one of our designers created, below to learn more about Daytrip's features!
Final product
Our developers built out a functional app beta prototype using Flutter, pulling in backend data from Google Maps API. Due to the very large scope of the project, it still remains in development. However, we received a lot of positive feedback from those who attended our senior showcase that they would like to download the app if we were to launch.
To visit our promotional site featuring our team, click here.
What I learned
I've been the project manager for multiple projects in the past, but this was the first time creating a product with such a large amount of features. As UX designers, we wanted to put in all the features possible to solve all of our users' needs. However, we had to hold back especially when it came to what we needed as MVP features for development.
I also found it important to extend deadlines when necessary. There are times when we wanted rush to development, however it was more beneficial to gather high-quality research and create solid designs that our users understood. Unfortunately, this left our dev team with less time to produce the back-end of our application. If we had more time, we would definitely refine and conduct more usability testing with our app.
