Tourtle is an interactive PC & Mobile App prototype that I designed around my idea of providing an online guided trip service to travelers. I enjoy planning very detailed trip itineraries for vacations I go on so I figured I should find a way to share my research with others. Tourtle would allow me to share an interactive map of activities, articles, and even full-fledged trip itineraries that other people could copy for their own trips.
Personal Project
User Experience Designer, User Researcher, User Interface Designer
Summer 2019 (6 weeks)
Adobe XD, Illustrator
Nearby Attractions
Guided Trips
Informative Articles
Competitive Analysis
Researched existing mapping services like Google, Yelp, and Zillow to understand how I can improve the travel experience with my guided tour concept.
Discovered that the hardest part of planning a trip is not finding things to do but finding out how to fit those things into a schedule.
Benchmark Testing
Tested various mapping and travel services to improve the user experience with better design and interactivity.
Implemented a mobile-first design for the map and content that could easily be applied to a desktop browser while keeping a familiar experience for the user.
Interviews
Conducted 4 user interviews with people who have low to high levels of experience traveling to find out how they plan and share their vacations.
Discovered that most spend excessive time and use multiple services when planning and sharing their vacations.
I created personas from the survey and user interviews to develop empathy and to have a reference guide making sure I understood who my solutions impacted and how. I referenced back to these frequently throughout the project.
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I chose these personas because I wanted to understand the needs and expectations for travelers with a wide array of experience traveling.
The research conducted up to this point allowed me to collect the Positives, Problems, and Potential Ideas from the surveyed. I used Mural.co and the Rose, Thorn, Bud method to visualize and empathize with their feelings. I then organized these feelings with Affinity Clustering to consolidate their insights. The overwhelming conclusion was that each person had varying requirements when planning a trip and knew of no service that could help.
I used the insights from my research to determine the product roadmap to determine what features were essential and what were optional.
For the Customer Journey Map, I designated the specific task of finding and viewing individual steps of a guided trip starting from the home page.
The Journey Map helped me find opportunities for improvement. For example, allowing users to save and customize guided trips on their profile came up as an improvement for the service.
I used rough sketches to help visualize how I could implement both the map and the content on a desktop web browser at the same time. I did not want the content to pop up over the map like Google Maps because that would detract from the guided trip’s experience. These sketches helped me get started wire-framing the design.
Creating the low-fidelity wireframes was immensely helpful for me to come up with the best visual hierarchy of content. I ended up creating and user-testing multiple drastically different wireframes before finalizing one that matched the mobile experience I wanted.
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
Iteration 5
Iteration 6
Tourtle was a passion project of mine that I was hoping could eventually become a real service. Because of this, I decided to create a full brand for it to match my passion.
Originally I decided to use a goofy turtle design that was conceptualized during the early white-boarding phase of Tourtle. I later decided to use a logo with a simplistic tone. The name was also changed from Tourtal to Tourtle to better match the spelling of turtle.
I conducted usability tests with 2 participants in person and 2 participants over online video calls. I asked the participants to perform the following actions.
The participants performed these tasks in the Mobile App and the Desktop Browser. I switched the order of these for each interview.
Successes
Needs Improvement
Iterating
This was a passion project of mine and I could not be happier with the final outcome. The user interviews, surveys, and testing showed that not only is there an interest in a service like this but that I could also create a prototype that they liked and understood. This project was also a great learning experience for me as I got to experiment more with animations in Adobe XD. This was also my first project focused on the Mobile First Design Principles and I think it really helped push the final product to the next level.
