RoadBuddy
ROAD TRIP PLANNING TOOL
Project Overview
RoadBuddy, a mobile app for road trip planning; pre-planning and planning on the go! Watch RoadBuddy become your most supportive pal on your trip by streamlining research of nearby attractions, generates route options based on user preferences and notifies the user so there will never be a missed stop again!
Role: UX Researcher, UI Designer
Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Miro, Tableau
Team members: Alex Kyu, Anahita Seghal, Diana Wang, Yvonne Huang
Timeline: September 2022 - December 2022
💡Goal💡
We are aiming to create a more pleasing and engaging travel experience through a mobile-based application which provides route recommendations that satisfy the travelers’ needs and preferences.
🧑💼 Poster Pitch
🔄 Process 🔄
LET’S GET GOING! 🚗💨
⚠️ How Might We? & Problem Statement
How might we help people optimize their travel route and stops depending on travel preferences when planning a road-trip?
We hypothesize from research that travelers plan their road trip routes based on different priorities and requirements/constraints. Additionally, typical online travel planning tools (e.g. Google travel and Trip Advisor), travelers are usually provided with the fastest path rather than given the opportunities to explore places on the way that best suit their needs.
🛠 Methods
Numerous amounts of contextual research methods were used...
Affinity Diagrams
Walk the Wall
Crazy 8’s
User Studies
Throughout this project, we utilized these methodologies to ideate for target users. Conducting preliminary research, interviewing participants, infinity diagramming, and creating hypotheticals through storyboarding; this helped us infer user behaviors and major pain points.
Group Travel
Solo Travel
After stepping in the 👞 of our target users, we are able to determine pains, gains and what kind of application would help them plan a successful road trip.
🗣 Evidence / Quotes
Through many rounds of conducting interviews, Think-a-Louds, storyboarding and user testings, we got one step closer to finding out more insights and what is the best tool that can help specific frustrations and can cater to personalized filtering.
Age: 24
Intermediate Planner, Car Owner
🗣 “When I try to add all the stops on my route it takes too long… I just want an app to fit a spline to the locations”
Age: 22
Newbie Planner, Travel with her dog
🗣 “I don’t like too many options… especially if they weren’t planned before. Too much information on the go stresses me out!”
Age: 23
Novice Planner, Nature Lover
🗣 “If I only have limited hours to spare… I want a tool to help me plan fast! … this is like a mini-check on becoming an adult”
✍️ Story Boarding
This method allowed us to rapid ideation. We brainstormed false scenarios that allowed us to develop tool ideas of various risks. The following stories all touch up on topics that correlate directly to user needs and pain points.
✅ Comparing attractions & travel options
✅ Collecting wanted recommendations
✅ Never miss a key stop
✅ Make detours easy
✅ Better budgeting
✅ MAKE USERS HAPPY! 🤩
Have you ever faced difficulty comparing different location options to find the best route for your road trip?
Have you had difficulty tracking your expenses to stay on budget when trip planning?
Have you ever been on a road trip and wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any key stops?
Have you ever needed recommendations from a certain type of person or group?
Have you ever suddenly wanted take a detour during a road trip but still wanted to loosely stick to your original plan?
👁 Insights that inspired our idea!
After this entire process it lead us to this moment…🔎 We speculated insights that will help inspire our application.
✅ Travelers aggregate across multiple sources when choosing and deciding anchor stops.
✅ Travelers have different road trip goals which lead to different behaviors and considerations.
✅ Travelers use various specialized tools for different planning purposes.
✅ Budget is a driving factor when making stops, selecting tools, and choosing accommodations.
✅ Low expectations of food available on route lead to food stops being quick spontaneous detours.
💡 Solution
Lo-Fi Sketches
Lo-Fi Screen Flow
To simplify the road trip travel planning process, we created an app designed to allow travelers to never miss an important stop along their route.
🎨 LET’S GET SOME COLOR IN HERE!
The color palette is kept quite simple, minimal and easy to read. I took a vibrant pink for selection purposes as it stands out and since this is meant to become a google maps plug in — the green is kept similar to that color palette.
Final Prototype + Adding Interactivity
The boarding screen allows the user to know the functionality of the tool with rapid screen visualizations that showcase main goals. This allows users to catch a glimpse of what the app entails and hopefully pushes them to pursue more.
RoadBuddy wants to get to know you. This quick filtering feature allows the user to have personalized settings directed to their travel interests, type of traveller and any unique road trip situation they might be in. We ask users to filter out types of resources - have the sources they trust with unlimited amount of external sources. Users can have notification preferences, allowing them to have total control over any route alerts.
Let’s GET ON THE ROAD! vroom vroom 🚗💨. After user input, users can now put their intended location prior to starting the trip. RoadBuddy will generate a personalized route with stop options based on user filters. As the user commence the trip, RoadBuddy will start recommending location stops to allow the user to personalize and explore while on the go!
⏭ Next steps…
How can this concept be integrated with more than road travel? We originally decided on road travel due to its flexibility and the ability for traveler control. However, I wonder what this concept of route recommendations would look internationally? I want to explore how this would look like if this is done through planes, trains and other alternative ways of travel.
📚 Take Aways
This project allowed me to test out multiple ways of research. Since this project is very much research based, I learned multiple contextual methods and gained important skills that allowed me to explore all avenues of trip planning and know the users. I understand the importance of research collection and how this contributes to ideation. This gave me a very good basis on what experienced and well developed research looks like, I can now utilize all these methods for future UI UX research.