A Junior Designer’s Labs journey: Resfeber
So this has been the (I want to say first) third or perhaps fourth time that I have collaborated on a project during my time studying at the Lambda School for Computer Science. The main problem has been that people don’t have a safe way to plan travel without booking flights. The unique issue to solve with this product is the ability to plan a road trip and plan places to stop along the way. Once pinned, the goal is to go into a bucket. That bucket can be vetted and added to build a new itinerary — add to an existing.
My initial thoughts upon receiving the project was: “Okay this is brilliant! I’ll be working on a travel research app; what’s the best thing about this? There’s been a definite need for safe travel planning since the strike of the pandemic.”
The goal was to create an app that would allow users to compile personalised wishlists and travel itineraries. The best thing about working on a project like this is the fact that I haven’t been researching and designing on my own, and instead, it’s been a collaborative effort between myself and another ux/product designer.
My main concern going into this project has been the idea that the developers wouldn’t be able to fully understand the role of the ux designers and how important our role was. I like to consider myself as someone who is incredibly professional, so instead of panicking about it, I approached the developers and our team lead about our concerns and they took everything onboard and were nice enough to join us in conducting the user research.
Before this, we had to carry out the tasks put in place in the product roadmap:
This was the first time I had ever encountered user stories, but they helped to distinguish the actions/steps that the user needs to take. We found it easy to compile the roadmap lists once we were aware of what was required from us for the first release.
Research & Challenges
One of the main challenges that myself and the team worked through was having the research implemented into the project initially, and then to have it discarded because of the developer limitations. I curated a list of questions to present to the stakeholders; categorising them by business goals, stakeholders, audience & customers, value proposition, product, user goals, competitors, technologies and obstacles.
Features & Goals
For the first release, the requirements and features were changed so many times because of limitations, the project is still a work in progress. It has also been quite difficult to pick up where we left off due to the fact that the research we carried out in the beginning is no longer valid. However, we did manage to get back on track and the shipped features for release 1 are:
- AUTHENTICATION — Users should be able to successfully log into the application.
- CREATE TRIP — Users should be able to create a trip that has the ability to search for destinations and add those destinations. The user will be able to start building the itinerary.
- TRAVEL ITINERARY — On the user’s trips, they should be able to build and itinerary. This itinerary will allow the user to add destinations, excursions, accommodations, entertainment, etc. Within each itinerary item, the user should be able to select the activity and build a checklist, add notes, upload documents, embed links, etc.
For the future of the product, I hope to see trip cost estimations, adding flight and hotel information and for the user to track and add notes and comments. It would also be good for them to receive push notifications about live flight details.
Despite the mishaps and hiccups throughout the project process, I’m really appreciative that I was able to go through this because of the idea that this will happen throughout my career, and I would rather that it happened now (before I’ve become a fully-fledged UX designer).