UX/UI Design of the Tengah travel app
A pair of entrepreneurs and avid travellers came up with the idea of creating a community driven app for other travellers. People would enter in what they paid for goods and services so that the average price could be determined and travellers could then view this average price to understand comparatively if they were paying a low, high or average price.
My job was to work as part of a UX/UI team to design this app, while conducting user research to ensure the app was as closely tailored to the user needs as possible, and eliminating as many potential road blocks as we could while still bringing the app idea to life and working within time and budget constraints.
We began by conducting interviews with people who had travelled twice a year or more for the last 3 years. We asked them questions like...
What are some of the steps you take to planning your overseas trip in terms of purchases?
Where do you go for information when planning your trip?
What determines your purchases when you are travelling overseas?
As well as some other general questions to understand more about these people. We then created a survey so that we could quantify our findings and ask more questions about people's travel habits. 30 people responded to this survey and here is what we discovered...
Results that validated the app idea
73% of people felt that knowing the average price of a product or service would help them determine whether that price was something they wanted to pay or not
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86% of people were already searching for prices online to help influence their overseas purchases, and 75% said that over the last year they have downloaded apps that have helped them to problem solve in different areas of their lives
Some key information we found surrounding purchasing
We discovered more information about the specific products and services that people were purchasing prior to travelling or while travelling overseas
79% of people search for price comparisons both when they are overseas and also when planning their trip before they have left
Some findings that went against the app idea
63% of people felt that being part of the community of people who post on the app was not enough incentive for them to post what they paid for
So what we gathered from our research was that the app idea was something that would likely be of interest to people, as well as finding out the specific products and services that they search for and the stages in their travelling and travel planning that they search for them. However, people did not feel there was an incentive to make their own entries. With this new information, we created a persona to help us picture who it was that we were designing for...
User flow and lo-fi prototype testing
The next part of the process was creating a user flow to help us map out a lo-fi version of the app. With our lo-fi prototype, we tested some elements of the app that we felt needed more validation and investigation based off of our recent findings. Here are some key findings of ours...
What we tested
Search results distance
We designed the app to gather search results from within a 50km radius of the location entered by the user into the app
What we discovered
The majority of users preferred their search results to either be entries from within walking distance, or for the distance to change based off of the product or service they are searching for
Displaying the users who posted entries
We displayed the icons and names of the users who posted entries to add to the community driven feel, as well as showing results as valid and real. We hoped this would incentivise people to contribute by making their own entries
The majority of users felt that seeing entries from other users meant that the results were more valid and trustworthy. However, users felt that there was a privacy concern with showing entries with a combination of the time and location that the entry was made, alongside a profile picture and name
Push notifications
A push notification from the app reminding users to make an entry stating what they purchased for a product or service after they searched for the average price of that product or service. The goal of this was also to encourage users to make their own entries
The majority of users felt that this would help prompt them to make entries, however they felt that they would probably need further incentive. Our hypothesis was that a reward system would encourage users to post what they paid
Products and categories
We asked users what they would search for when travelling and planning their travel and then asked them to find their product or service within the set of categories and keyword tags inside those categories. This allowed us to assess whether our categorisation system was easy to use and successful in gathering results.
Users were able to easily find their products and services within the categories and tags that we created. However, users mentioned that they would like a broader range of tags, and each user had a slightly varied version of what tags they felt would be most useful to them when searching for products and services.
Currency displayed
The currency we displayed to users was the one that was specific to the place that the user was making the entry from
Most users wanted to see the currency displayed on entries as their home country's currency, and some wanted to have the ability to see both their home currency and the currency of the place that they were making the entry from
With some further insight into the more intricate details of the app, we moved into our design studio where we began creating our UI design prototype. We created branding guidelines and iterated on the functionality of the app with our recent learnings in mind, and then finished the project off by handing over a complete prototype. Here are some of the final iterations we made based off our lo-fi prototype testing...
We created an adjustable search radius to allow users to make changes based around the different products they would be searching for
We designed the app so that users entered a username instead of a name, and did not need a profile picture so that privacy was protected. To maintain the validity of the results by showing that real users entered these prices, we designed the app so that it would confirm your phone number first in order to create a new account.
We created push notifications to remind users to make entries after viewing products and services. We also advised that in the future when the budget will allow for further development of the app, that a reward system be implemented to further encourage users to make entries.
We designed the app with the same categories that we tested with since they were successful. In terms of tags, we designed the app so that users could add their own tags when making an entry rather than just using the tags that were already provided
We made both the currency of the country users are travelling to, and their home currency visible on all entries