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2022 / 8-week / team to self project

Rendezvous is a location sharing app for travelers to keep tabs on each other and plan for their trip while exploring new places. It also secures users' privacy by limiting data sharing.

Because....

In this interface class, my teammates and I were challenged to create a user experience using location sharing. We decided to put our focus on group traveling since it’s a situation where location sharing is often used, to either ensure one’s safety or communicate progress.

In addition, in the process of traveling, location sharing has already started when we discuss where to visit. Thus, we also want to explore location sharing not only in the format of literal “coordinates” on a map, but also as a piece of “message” to send to others.

My role

01. Product thinking

I worked with other 3 classmates at the beginning of the project to understand the problem space and develop initial designs. In the process, I specifically led discussions to define product priorities from research and set product goals to fight complexity and break problems into easy-to-use solutions. 

02. User experience(User flow refinement & iterations)

After the project ended, I spent two more weeks to iterate the user flows to meet user testing feed backs and revise the overall experience. At the end, I created high fidelity prototypes to sum up the project.

What it does.....

Using map as the major touchpoint for visualizing plans and ensuring safety, Rendezvous provides users a better sense of their situation and helps them manage information between maps and chats during a trip.

Users can easily check their friends' location to ensure their safety and navigate to the approximate location of the group when they are separated. Rendezvous converts and presents location information with intuitive visualizations for users to easily view and discuss their plan in chats.

Discern group location & Navigate to the group

schedule a rendezvous point from the home map

View proposed Rendezvous at once with group location

Confirm going & View the scheduled Rendevous on home

Research

01.
When exploring unfamiliar environments, travelers rely on each other to resolve confusing and unsafe situations.

  • 7/10 of participants mentioned they usually call their travel friends to get the location information when they couldn't find each other.

  • 4/10 of participants mentioned when they arrived at new places, they checked their friends' locations with existing location-sharing apps to meet up with them.

03.
It’s tough to differentiate information and message on a small screen with multiple external links.

  • For a spontaneous hangout, participants usually use phones to plan meetups.

  • Juggling between maps, web, and chat screens to negotiate a meetup places could be very inconvenient.

To develop a better understanding of what problems people have while traveling in groups, we started by conducting interviews with 10 participants, who have experiences traveling in groups settings. We want to understand what role location information play in the context of traveling. 

02.
There are inconvenient aspects of traveling in a group that detract from the enjoyability of the trip (lost fellow travelers, waiting for them, coordinating meetup points).

  • Participants felt insecure when they have to separate in groups or don’t know where their friends are.

  • Travelers have different tastes and paces when visiting places.

  • Group coordination such as planning the trip takes a lot of time.

Research Insights

how might we

allow a group of travelers to easily plan and enjoy the trip to new places while keeping tabs on each other?

Define problems

Personas

To help set our product goals, we created personas for our targeted users based on our interviews. This way we can understand more clearly on their pain points and solve for their needs. 

Design goals

01. Check status & Navigate

View individual and group location
Help individual navigate back to the group

02. Direct Communication

Share locations with travel group
Message travelmates

03. Better and easier way to decide a meetup location

‍Enable to view shared locations at the same time 
View important announcement

We set up the basic design goals based on users' feedback. The general goal here is to design a spontaneous, convenient, and easy-to-use location-sharing app with messaging features to help plan trips and meetups.

Ideation

generating a rendezvous point in an unfamiliar place & helping them locate each other during the trip.

To solve the pain points, we ideated three directions, which they respectively focus on different aspects of user needs of our personas. Thus, we decided to take parts of each ideas and use them as 3 user flows of one design that focuses on

Taskflow & Wireframes

We then made task flows and wireframes to view the flow in a higher level and design the information structure of the app.

Primary flow (Set rendezvous point)

We explored many different ways to set a rendezvous point by first listing down task flows and then visualizing it with quick wireframes. This way we can quickly compare between 2 user flows and conduct quick A/B testing.

Lofi prototypes

Usability testing

With lo-fi prototypes, we conducted user testings with 4 users to get feedback on the flows, UI hierarchies, and interactions.

Iterations

01. Switch focus to planning a trip

To make propagating location information intuitive, we decided to emphasize the planning aspect of the experience which allowed users to "schedule a meetup" instead of just "setting a rendezvous", so user has a clearer incentive when trying to share information with others.

And to make it discoverable and give users more control in their choice of rendezvous point, we made this feature accessible from both home and chat page.

02. Optimize planning experience

As the planning becomes the main feature, we wanted to make juggling between the chat and location information easy.

03. Limit data sharing by travel group

To give more limitation on sharing locations and more privacy control to the users, we make the users to create travel group during onboarding process, which made them only able to see the friends/travel buddies of the trip.

Let's Travel!

Create a trip and invite your travel buddies!

Location data were only shared among the travel buddies you sent the invite link to. As the trip ends, location sharing will also expired.

Navigate

Oops, you're separated from the group. That's okay simply tap on the discern button to see the whole group's location and navigate to them.

The system will let you know when the individuals are too far apart.

Let's meet here!

If you already have a meetup plan in mind,
just share the location to the chat.

Where to meet?

Want to discuss where to meet up next?
Create a list of rendezvous with your friends

View and discuss

View all suggested rendezvous on a single map
and view the relative distance of your friends' location with the rendezvous

Discuss and decide

As you and your group decide on a meetup place,
go ahead and schedule a rendezvous for the team to view on their map.

Confirm

Confirm the rendezvous, so it's marked on your "map." Easily find the information and navigate to the location when it's time.

vento & verbi

Iot / UX Design

PTTV

APp / motion tracking

Luminaire Jar

User Research / UX Design

ariel62212@gmail.com

206-428-8112