Social media app for female solo travelers
UX design ▪ Hackathon ▪ IterateUX
Design a platform for solo travelers to connect with each other, exchange information and find fellow travelers.
UX designer in a team of 4 designers
August 17 – September 18, 2023
Project background
IterateUX is a company that holds 1-month hackathons. Participants compete in teams of 4-5 UX designers from all over the world.
All teams were presented with 5 challenge prompts and they could choose whatever prompt that they wanted to work on.
I was lucky to work alongside 3 super talented UX designer on this project.
Our product won the first place for the best product among 24 teams and over 100 UX designers around the world!
We received lots of praises from a panel of judges including seasoned UX designers and UX hiring managers.
Design a platform for solo travelers to connect with each other, exchange information and find fellow travelers.
Research phase
We started by desk research as a cost-effective first step to help us understand where should we dig deeper.
In 2022, 16% of Americans took a solo trip and, in 2023, 25% of Americans ( 83 million people ) are considering taking a solo trip.
84% of solo travelers are women.
59% of female solo travelers would travel alone again in the next 12 months.
Women also face more challenges during their solo travel, especially about their safety.
That’s why after doing the secondary research, we decided to focus our efforts on “Female solo travelers“.
We analyzed 6 competitors “Nomadher”, “Hustelworld”, “Travel Buddy”, “Travel Ladies”, ” Find Penguins”, and “Travello” in terms of:
Our goal was to find a way to better serve the solo travelers and build a competitive design solution.
We conducted 5 user interviews with college-educated and financially independent female solo travelers from different nationalities to get to know their:
To validate our initial findings from the user interviews, we sent out a comprehensive survey to get to know the larger audience better.
We received 49 responses.
Gathering insights
We put all of our findings on the canvas and we started to affinity mapping our findings.
The main categories of the affinity map were:
Based on our research findings, we built one primary persona to build empathy and keeping the user at the center of the design process:
We also prioritize the pain points using an impact/value matrix to help us narrow down our focus to the most important ones:
defining, ideation & testing
As a young woman who likes to travel solo, I need to have access to the most updated information about my destination so that I can plan a safe and affordable trip for myself .
We wrote down 34 HMW questions to help the ideation process based on the POV statement. Here are some of those questions:
We ideated over 20 different ideas and after careful consideration, we chose the final idea based on calculating a score for each idea. These were the acceptance criteria:
Users would have access directly to the latest information about a destination, by searching for other’s recent experience travelling to that place.
While creating a post, users are asked to rate the safety of the place that they visited. They can see these ratings as tags above each post.
Users would enter the approximate budget that they spent on a trip while creating a post. They can see the budget of each trip as tags above the posts.
Users can choose the language of their choice, the currency that they want to see budget trips with and they can also mark wheelchair friendly paths.
Here’s our value proposition statement:
“We help female solo travelers find safe affordable trip plans by offering a social media app where they can share & find the most updated information about various trip plans.”
We started with low-fidelity design and explored various patterns. After lots of discussions and iterations, we designed mid-fi mockups and start the preparation for the usability testing.
We came up with these 2 main tasks to do moderated remote usability testing with 5 of users:
Some icons like save, share and inbox were confusing for the users.
We rearrenged some icons and change some of them to make them more clear.
Users weren’t sure which button to click for advanced search. They also wanted to know about the “nearby paths”.
We combined all the filter icons into one, and we added “Nearby paths”.
We created a mood board to choose the color and the feel of the app. We also brainstormed different names for our app.
Avandra is the Greek goddess of travel, adventure and luck. The literal meaning of it is “She who makes the path“.
We checked the compliance of the color palette with WCAG2 and APCA accessibility guidelines.
The idea is a person goes on a trip, comes back, and share the places they visited the way they want. That’s how they create a path for others. They can share their general path, or shopping centers, nature spots, art and museums, etc.
Each post has 4 tags that helps with the most up-to-date information, safety and affordability:
The incentive for sharing their path like any other social media is getting popularity and recognition from the community of the female solo travelers.
Unlike our competitors, we don’t ask users for verification upfront. Users can have limited access to the different parts of the app, and make an informed decision whether or not to go through the verification process. The account verification process includes email registration, uploading an ID and a selfie while holding the ID in hand. This is a safety measure to ensure a women-only community.
We plan to do an unmoderated usability test using an online tool called “Maze”. These are the metrics that we want to measure the success of our solution with:
Career coaching platform for stay-at-home parents
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