Away to Africa
Inspiring travelers to explore, book, manage and build community through their trips to Africa
My Role:
UX Designer, Researcher & Project Manager
Client:
Team:
Team of 6
Timeframe:
3 week sprint
Project Context
Away to Africa (ATA) is a destination management company that hosts cultural tours, designs experiences, and manages logistics for travelers throughout 15 countries in Africa, with plans to expand to 22 countries.
As the company continues to grow, they are looking to:
Make ATA more competitive for investment funding, through creating a mobile app to complement its existing website
Increase scalability, as the ATA founder manually handles most backend processes
Create a social environment for potential and current travelers to build community
Knowing this, we knew we needed to do 3 things:
Build community between current and potential travelers (how they connect, share social updates)
Streamline customer access to trip information (how they discover, book and manage their travel)
Do this through an iOS app, given that the majority of current ATA users use iOS
Uncovering user needs in travel and social media, and opportunities for our design to meet those needs
Research & Findings
We conducted research through user interviews, competitive and comparative analyses, a service design blueprint, and a journey map, to understand users’ travel and social media habits, as well as the existing opportunities in the current business and market.
User Interviews
Our goal for user interviews was to understand user needs and pain points throughout the international travel process, and how users interact with social media while traveling. We identified previous ATA travelers (provided through our client) and other general international travelers as our target users for interviews.
Research synthesis through affinity mapping revealed a few trends:
Most users do research before trips to feel organized and prepared
During trips, users prioritized immersing themselves in local culture, food and experiences.
Some users preferred to travel in small groups and maximize quality time over posting on social media.
Other users enjoyed traveling in larger groups and posting updates regularly to social media.
Competitive & Comparative Analyses
A feature analysis between competitors (snapshot of the full analysis above) illuminated ATA’s opportunities to provide an experience consistent with competitors (community features, detailed itinerary info, map views, etc.), as well as areas that set ATA apart (themed trips and guides local to each country).
Through these analyses, we wanted to see what makes ATA unique and what other players in the industry do well.
Service Design and Journey Mapping
We also wanted to analyze how ATA is operating currently and where the gaps, opportunities to streamline and scale existed. We made a service design blueprint to visualize this.
This is only a snapshot of the total process, with the blue spaces outlined in black representing some of the many actions completed manually by ATA’s founder on the back-end. While the user experience has been positive due to the founder’s diligence, this is not a scalable solution, especially across so many different mediums (Drive, email, WeTravel, WhatsApp, Zoom)
This journey map (snapshot shown here) also made it clear that getting ready for travel is the part of the user’s journey that causes the most anxiety and worry - so we wanted to be sure to address this in our app design.
Designing to alleviate pre-trip anxiety, build a seamless trip experience, and cultivate a lasting community post-trip
design & IDEATION
To kickstart our thinking on the many potential solutions to our core user problems, we began ideating by asking questions like:
How might we make the app useful for those who have not yet booked a trip through ATA?
How might we create peace of mind for the user regarding documents and packing lists so that they don’t have to worry leading up to the trip?
How might we help people get their questions answered, and get to know fellow travelers in the ATA community at the same time?
Sketching
Home, Documents and Checklist screens:
Address user pre-trip anxiety by putting this information front and center on the homepage and dedicated screens
Alert travelers when there are documents that need their attention
Recommend essentials they should bring, based on location
Proactively share information about local weather, Covid restrictions, etc.
We then began sketching through rounds of Design Studio, in order to best share our ideas collaboratively as a group (especially a geographically-distributed group), and discuss our potential screens and priority features. The rough sketches below were really the foundation for our higher fidelity wireframes.
My Trips screens:
Itinerary view: travelers can quickly scroll through each day
Map view: more detailed information for each day so travelers know which activities are coming up, how they should prepare
Tags (special interest groups), Profile and Social Media screens:
Remind users to continue posting updates on established platforms like Instagram, using the ATA hashtag
Create “tags” where travelers can get to know other like-minded travelers and make new connections, even beyond the destination they’re going to
Designate some users as Ambassadors so other travelers can ask them questions about their experience
Through these sketches, we narrowed down on the main screens we wanted to highlight, and the key features that would be on each in order to meet our users’ pain points. With these priorities in mind, we started wireframing to bring these ideas to life.
Wireframing
Homepage and bottom navigation: keeping Documents, Checklist and Itinerary easily accessible
Documents page: accessing and filling out important docs in-app
Checklist page: pre-filled recommendations on what to bring, customized by destination
My Trips Itinerary page: easily scroll through each day of your upcoming trip
My Trips Map view: explore your upcoming activities in more detail for that day
Inbox: chat directly with other fellow travelers, with special-interest groups (Tags), or with ATA Staff
Profile page: link your social media accounts, share which Tag groups you identify with, and find other travelers
Post: share your experience with established social media outlet integration
Style Guide
We created a style guide to maintain a consistent look from the ATA website: black, white, and yellow for call to action buttons & accents to convey happiness and adventure.
Font: Wanting to stay close to the original site’s font, we used Work Sans, a sans-serif font that is a bit wider and makes it easier to read & follow.
Icons: We used the same style of outlined symbols throughout the pages to make the app flow cohesively.
Prototype Highlights
Logging in with options to explore as a guest
Taking the quiz to figure out your ideal next destination
Seeing a detailed itinerary before reserving your spot
Accessing and signing important documents
Checklist to keep you organized
Toggle between an itinerary overview, or go into more day-specific detail so you know how to prepare for each day
Message travelers and special-interest groups (tags) to build your connections
Build a profile so other travelers can add you
Build a social media post, to be integrated and posted within your platform of choice (e.g., Instagram)
testing & iterations
Improving app intuitiveness, while increasing user satisfaction and decreasing user error
Usability Testing - Round 1 (mid-fi)
Our first round of usability testing showed promising results and some areas for improvement. We saw 3 trends:
Trend: Users were unsure when documents were complete or needed signing.
Solution: we bolded text to emphasize recent messages, and a blue notification icon to maintain consistency in the design
Trend: Users had difficulty recognizing features like the recent messages in their inbox
Solution: we changed the color and size of Documents alert icons to further indicate which documents are complete and which need action
Trend: users also were unsure how to post on social media
Solution: we included a camera roll overlay by referring to established app designs to make adding photos to social media posts more intuitive
We iterated on our designs based on Round 1 feedback, and did a second round of usability testing once arriving at hi-fi.
Usability Testing - Round 2 (hi-fi)
Users were more satisfied with the app, with improved success rates, decreased misclick rates, and quicker time spent on task. We made another round of iterations based on the feedback we received.
Trend: users struggled with differentiating between the direct and group/tag inboxes
Solution: we shifted the alignment for the direct and tags toggle from right to left, for a more intuitive visual pattern
Trend: users also were confused by the ordering of location tag and camera roll.
Solution: we decided to reorder the tag location and add photo buttons when users build a post, to create a more intuitive path
next steps
Given more time, we’d like to continue building on what we’ve delivered so far, and allow for a more personal experience that builds community, such as:
Adding customization to the checklist, for people to add and remove items and have everything in one place
Including more reviews for trips on the My trips page, and potentially for each excursion
Integrating a way to announce upcoming trips - using push notifications to notify people who have downloaded the app that a new trip has been released, and that sign ups are possible, maybe even offering them a deal
Customizing the experience for users based on where they’re at in the process