WHO: in collaboration with Adamarie Laboy
WHERE: Integrative Studio 2
WHAT: UX design, UI design, design research, business modeling, branding, workshop facilitation
WHY: En route is an app that provides seamless travel plans curated by you for you. We want to be the friend who’s showing you around town when you don’t have that local friend in town. We spare you the pain of planning journey, so you can be en route for your actual big journey.
Play with the prototype:
Having conducted design research on food psychology and retail experience in the previous semester respectively, Ada and I spent the first week or so to find common ground of our insights. We adopted multiple mapping tools to make sense whether a customer’s fashion and food choices are conflicted or they can be guided into a shared opportunity area.
With the rise of a discerning customer base, we found a shared opportunity area to bridge and elevate online and offline experience while maintaining a customer’s pursuit of knowledge, identity and power. That opportunity lies in travel.
In the refinement phase, we discovered three tiers of needs shared by retail and food experiences, in order to form a decision.
- The survival level on the bottom is the fundamental tier we need to perform basic human functions.
- As we move upward the pyramid, factoring the curiosity to explore more alternatives, we begin to see more social patters.
- Knowledge-driven leisure seekers use fashion and food choices to represent and strengthen their identities and power, which is why anxiety free enjoyment is on the very top. This is the layer that we call the nirvana of consumption.
In this exercise, we intend to explore where does our business position? We see the top two tiers as our primary target market. From both our quantitative and qualitative research, we noticed diversified behaviors particularly when people travel. Some customers tend to spend more on food, some on shopping. It is crucial to be mindful, especially in the early stage, about the contingencies in behavior. Therefore, the service we provide needs to demonstrate a capacity of flexibility. There’s a fine balance between option availability and information overflow.
We adopted a customer-centric design approach throughout to understand the most urgent pain points and needs. To expand our horizon, we hosted an ideation workshop surrounding the keywords shown below:
Bottom-up co-creation helps uncover the real insights in customer needs. We provided a keyword to each roundtable with two guiding questions. Shown above is the flow of the process, below are some pictures taken from the workshop. Under the topic of food and fashion, we asked participants to draw anything that came to mind when they saw the keyword and pass it on to the next person without explaining, so that more ideas were generated.
Between designing for a sci-fi fueled value system in the future and designing for the tenderness of joie de vivre, we wonder:
1. How food and fashion choices can be a way of self expression and empowerment?
2. How to build memories by creating emotional bond within a trust network, through cross sensory experiences?
Design principles:
Exclusive, educational, empowering
Mission:
- Be the trustworthy source to help customers navigate through big data.
- Concentrate on how personal data can be gathered, processed, stored and utilized ethically.
Research never ends. To back up our idea, we briefly conducted another round of desk research. The most interesting finding is the rise of solo travelers and how existing services haven’t fulfilled their needs. The highlight of the stats is ONLY 38% of the solo travelers will do it again because they tend to:
- Over plan, because they are afraid of being lonely on the trip. The itinerary ends up being overpacked.
- Not plan enough because there wasn’t someone reminding of the details like weather, transportation and local customs.
Through more in-depth interviews, we found out how fragmented the planning process can be for a trip. Because being en route for the big journey, a customer is already lost in screenshots. This has informed us to prioritize the need for customization and co-creation when curating the best route for a user.
In this step, Adamarie and I asked people what colors occured to them when they think of certain objects and tested multiple color themes and fonts with them. We decided to go with the following color theme to build our prototype:
This is how we add value.
Shown below are some sample interfaces showing the key functions of the final prototype.
The business model is a tool from design thinking we used to map out how we can deliver the value to customers. Details are shown below.
To build a strong case for our business model, we examined our market position using SWOT and looked into the direct market we are competing in, which is visualized in a 2x2 map.
The futures work helps a startup build resilience to survive in uncertainties. Based on emerging trends, we proposed several emergent strategies to enhance the quality of service for en route.