UX Research Study Of GO SOLO— A Solo Travel App
Overview
Go Solo is a solo travel app to help users find and book flights, lodging, restaurants and ensure the users are safe throughout their journey.
Why Go Solo?
Well that’s a two way question. Why go solo? Go solo because it is a liberating experience and everyone should experience this at least once. Now coming to why Go Solo? A few years back I planned a solo trip to Goa for myself but everyone around me (except my parents because they didn’t know about it) were skeptical about this plan because a) I’m clumsy and I might mess up my flight schedules and other bookings b) I am a woman, hence comes the safety issues which honestly sucks but it is what it is. I planned my trip anyway and I loved the experience but there were certain restrictions which I put on myself. For example; I didn’t step out after 10pm or leave early morning which meant missing sunrise. I had a couple of different hotels booked in different parts of Goa depending on what my plans were and I kind of messed up the booking dates. So basically, I was investing more time in organizing my entire journey instead of actually enjoying all of it. And after this trip I really wanted to do something to help people go solo because I know there are people who would love to travel solo but are holding themselves back because of the above mentioned issues, hence GO SOLO!
Coming up with the name and the logo
The name came to me almost instantly when I thought of the concept. “Go Solo” is what I’m pushing my users to do and I wanted to keep the logo as simple as possible.
I used a light sky blue color (#8bcbf9) as the color theme of my app because when it comes to reliability, trust and security, “Blue“ is the best choice. I went with a quirky font ( Golden mind) to keep the fun factor alive.
Research Goal
I started my research with Competitive Analysis. There are a few solo travel apps where they let the travelers meet fellow solo travelers. Well this is a good feature to have but this can also lead to privacy and safety issues. Few of the main features that the other apps tried to incorporate are blogs, meeting fellow travelers, sharing photos and experiences etc. I wanted to concentrate more on organizing the entire trip in a way that the user gets 3 important things; flights, hotels and restaurants, and also a feature which can ensure their safety by letting their families know where they are exactly.
Travelling solo could be challenging so my research goal was to help the travelers tackle these challenges and travel tension free. So I conducted user interviews! This was done by google forms and also by personal interviews. I had 23 responses which included avid solo travelers and people who would love to travel solo but are holding themselves back.
You will find the interview questionnaire here. This was the basic framework of the questions asked and the rest depended on their responses.
I also created a potential user persona just to have an idea of the demographics based on the competitive analysis. This is purely based on assumptions from the research and it helped me in setting my priorities as it came to the UI part.
Designing Thinking Process
Design Thinking process consists of 5 main steps; Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. The order is not important here but following all the steps is very important when it comes to designing and researching a particular product.
Empathy
Empathy is the first step towards understanding the problem and also the users. You make a user persona to give life to the target user you are catering your app to.
User Persona
I have two personas that I came up with after the user interviews. We have Seema Sharma who is a married woman and Joanna D’Souza who is a 25 year old blogger.
Define
Affinity Maps — Based on responses
These are the responses from the interaction with the interviewees. I have noted down the common responses that I got from the interview and further I will be deciding on my priorities which will help me define what exactly the features will be and I can ideate accordingly.
User Interview Insights
The following is the insight I got from the responses to the questionnaire and just general interaction from people who travel every now and then to people who have never travelled alone.
- Users love to travel solo because they like to challenge themselves by breaking out of the comfort zone.
- They don’t have to depend on others while travelling alone.
- Trouble managing all the bookings (flight, stay) in different apps as some apps give good offers for flights and some for stay.
- Finding local restaurants.
- When asked if they would like to meet fellow travelers, almost all of them refused because they go solo because it is a liberating experience and they would love to meet the locals but not fellow travelers.
- Most of them take planned trips instead of backpacking.
Here’s a sneak peak to the UI design of the app which will be up in few days.
Summary
UX Research is something I personally enjoy doing more than the UI part of the work. GO SOLO is a concept very close to home because I love to travel and especially solo, the only reason I don’t is because of safety issues and I don’t want to take that risk which eventually lead to this concept. The safety feature in the app(which you will see in the UI blog) can be improved but I did what I could with the limited knowledge and information that I could gather( and understand). I hope to receive feedbacks here because I know this is not a 100% perfect.
Thank you so much for taking your time out to read my blog. If you like what I have done here please comment, follow or maybe clap :P I would really like that!
