Let's Talk about The Process
Define Opportunity Space
We started with exploring opportunity spaces that a new mobile service could meet their needs. Through a few group discussions, we decided to focus on city exploring, to help people understand unique city cultures and customs. We sent out a survey via social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) to gather both travelers and locals pain points and wishes about city exploring.
We found out that there is a great space of city exploring for both people who travel in cities and people who just move to new cities and want to discover the hot spots. We wanted to create something to bring these people together in a fun way, to show each city's unique traditions and customs.
Competitive Analysis
By analysing existing travel websites and mobile apps, we made a radar diagram showing their strengths and weaknesses in five different aspects. We thought enjoyability combines with perks & rewards would be an opportunity space to step into.
Ideation - Storyboards & Speed Dating
After synthesized our findings, we brainstormed ideas related to this theme and narrowed down to the best five possible concepts for a new mobile service.
We created storyboards for the five concepts to illustrate the possible interaction scenario. Using these concept storyboards, we conducted 4 in-person and online "speed dating" sessions to gather feedback about the efficacy and desirability of our proposed solutions. This ensured us to gather feedback and update our thoughts early.
Storyboard of the chosen concept
Customer Journey Map
We created a Customer Journey Map to illustrate the relevant "touchpoints" that users may encounter when experiencing our envisioned service over time. It foregrounds how the customer feels and what they might be thinking and doing at each stage. The questions users may think/feel guided us to design the experience.
Iterative Design
We drafted out the chosen design idea, and created some paper prototypes , which was supposed to show a flow of the main functions of our app. We did 9 think-aloud with potential users, gathered usability feedback from them and iterated 6 rounds of the prototype. This process helped us evaluate our first draft of UI.
Branding
We created a digital mood board as the inspirations for the design language. Through the moodboard, we saw a clean, curious and upbeat feeling - but each city has its unique experience, so we decided to customize the color palette to each of our flagship cities.
Interactive Prototype
The final high-fidelity prototype can be found here through Marvel.
Pitching The Mobile Service
Thinking practical, we would need resources to fully implement our design. We created a video pitch and a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to advertise our innovative services. We even designed a list of perks for our Kickstarter supporters. We didn't really launch the campaign eventually, but you can still view the preview here.
