Case Study
Ramble
Product Designer・February 2021
Pre-pandemic, 67% of travelers said "safety and security" matter most, while 54% are driven by "diversity of things to do/amenities" (CNN, 2017).
How might we provide travelers a centralized means for safety considerations?
Overview
Ramble is a native iOS app that provides travelers with safety insights and additional cultural information to help them best acclimate during their trip abroad.
We equip travelers with knowledge for learning an unfamiliar place, such as cultural practices and resources, safe routes to walk, and the comfort of knowing other users are contributing to the community in real-time.
Problem Space
Travel, Safety
Role
UX Research
Team
4 UX Designers
Tools
Figma, Keynote, Maze, Miro
Time
2 weeks,
February 2021
UX Design
Wireframes
Sprint Goals
Design a Product from the ground up.
Contribution
In this product development sprint, I led our team through research and synthesis to drive storytelling
and product development.
Tagline
Research
Let's talk about safety.
Research Process
We hypothesized that travelers find it hard to have accurate and local safety knowledge in real time, figuring they cobbled together their own knowledge base on what to do and what not to do from multiple sources.
To see if we were on the right track, we selected five people from a screener survey, focusing on people who traveled frequently within the past year (or often prior to Covid-19). Each 20-minute interview was conducted over Zoom.
Synthesis
After interviews, we created an affinity map containing short-form insights; we accumulated and sorted 147 data points. From these clusters, we identified the following trends ☞
Cluster size correlates with trend strength. I like big bubbles and I cannot lie.
Let Norma be your guide.
Persona
Based on our data, our target audience would be a traveler who favors independent exploration. Our persona, a characterization of this target audience, embodies a curious, independent traveler.
Take a walk in Norma's shoes.
User Journey
When people think about local culture, one of their first thoughts is, "Wow, let's try the food." Like many of our interviewees, Norma's journey starts with her arrival at a hostel, and ends at a local eatery.
Pain Points
-
Switching between multiple mobile platforms and word-of-mouth to find the right place
-
Getting turned around on her path and encountering an uncomfortable situation
-
Distracted upon arrival, and forgets important local knowledge or is unaware of local customs
Opportunities
-
See if others nearby are taking a similar path (the buddy system)
-
Know with relative certainty her route matches her safety needs
-
Let others in the community know how the experience was
-
Quickly check in with family to notify of safe arrival
Early Design
Collaborative Design Process
Democratic design processes were essential to this product, especially since core app functions were based on community-building.
To give more body to the features we thought our MVP would need, we ran a design studio where we sketched out ideas how features might look/work, gave each other feedback, and then repeated until we came up with a combination of our ideas for
mid-fi wireframes.
Wireframes
Goals for initial testing were to understand how users navigated the following tasks:
-
Search destination
-
Find alternate path
-
Understand context for possible interactions
Takeaways From Initial Testing
We ran 5 remote tests over Zoom and all were able to grasp the basic flow.. We also gained the following qualitative insights:
-
Users find subtleties within our categories of cultural norms
-
Wording dining (food/cutlery etiquette) vs cultural clothing to differentiate this
-
Some users evaluate route based on their personal safety preferences, while others evaluate instinctively
-
Redefine the use of the “fastest” route and why someone would take it — indicating maybe what kind of caution there might be on this route?
Iteration
Key Updates
Testing showed that most users expect the fastest route to be prioritized since it follows the current functionality of maps. As such, we updated the arrangement of the routes from fastest to slowest.
-
We increased the “change route” button to allow for users to locate this option more easily as we found that users were missing this feature during the usability tests
-
We increased the pop-out box as well because of what we addressed previously. The bottom bar changed to better reflect the current functionality of Google Map
Next Steps
For the next sprint cycle, we recommend grooming the following items:
-
Re-examine type size
-
Build out onboarding process to acclimate new explorers
-
Build Apple Watch functionality for road alerts
-
More detail on paths and precautions
-
Download map for off-line functionality
-
“Travel Diary” from recommendations gained in-person
-
Develop use cases for AirBNB hosts and loved ones
-
Build out social network for users with profiles
-
Loved ones as a “read-only,” with the goal of converting to active profiles