Process

We began by interviewing baby boomers, mainly women, who travel for a combination of work and pleasure. Using directed storytelling, we asked our participants to recount their most recent travel planning experience. We were interested in what tools they used, what problems they had, and how they coordinated planning tasks among family and friends. We also did a brick and mortar analysis of available travel planning tools.

From our research, we extrapolated a number of interesting areas of possible focus, such as budgeting and dealing with emergencies. We ultimately decided to focus on communication/delegation and scheduling, given our competitive analysis of existing products.

Following user research, we began developing a persona to guide the design process. The result was sixty-five year old Mary Miller.  Fleshing out the details of Mary’s life and trip helped determine product features and established consensus within our group across various design decisions. By outlining Mary’s life goals, experience goals, and end goals, we created measures against which our design could be continually evaluated.

Much of our time was spent at the whiteboard, drawing out system maps, navigational flows, and wireframes. We created wireframes based on a set of use cases we derived from our persona. This helped us spot problems early in the process, before we had become too committed to any feature of the product.

Because the decision making feature of our application was novel, we needed to prototype the feature to make sure the interaction was clear and usable. To do so, we created animations in Keynote, which we then showed to our peers for feedback. We found this method of prototyping to be particularly efficient and effective.

Our interface went through many iterations. Due to the age of our user group, we wanted to invoke a strong metaphor so the application appeared intuitive to those who may be less tech-savvy. However, many of those metaphors, such as a physical guidebook, were too literal and made for a tedious user experience. Instead, we opted to invoke the guidebook metaphor through language, rather than layout.

We began the visual design process by creating mood boards. Our first mood board displayed aspirational images of baby boomers. This drove the creation of our second mood board, which featured textures and colors. With these artifacts, we were able to decide on our color palette and begin fleshing out the UI details.