RoamWith
Travelling can be lonely. RoamWith is a social networking application that connects travellers so that they can share their travel adventures.
Concept
RoamWith started as a mock app concept for the Information Architecture section of George Brown’s UX Design Program. RoamWith is a social connection app designed for travellers seeking short-term travel partners. Travellers sharing the same destination will be able connect and make plans through the app. Working through the initial structural design, I quickly realized that I needed to gain a better understanding of potential users if I wanted to make informed structural design decisions. I expanded on the original assignment by conducting user interviews aimed to uncover user needs and pain points not currently met by existing products.
Process
There are several strong competitors in the travel networking app sphere. I wanted to identify the pain and value points experienced by users of the products that most closely resembled my concept. Through competitive analysis, I identified two potential competitors, Couchsurfing and Backpackr and recruited interview participants through their services.
I conducted five, hour-long interviews with 3 men and 2 women, hoping to understand:
What users hope to achieve by meeting other travellers
How users decide who to interact with
What qualifies as a successful interaction
After coding the interview notes I created an affinity diagram to identify high-level themes. Based on the emergent themes I identified three user struggles that informed RoamWith's target persona, user flows, wireframes, and low-fidelity prototypes.
User Insights
Traveller Confidence
In an unfamiliar country, something as simple as buying a bus ticket can be daunting without knowledge of the language or customs. User interviews indicated a lack of confidence as one of the main reasons for travelling with a partner.
The mere presence of a travel buddy gave users a confidence boost - this is a key point in the value proposition that RoamWith offers.
Users who can speak the language can be a valuable resource to users who cannot. RoamWith makes it clear which users can speak the local language so that they can determine who they can pair with to better achieve their goals.
The Explore section of RoamWith will list attractions and expeditions that might interest users, but are too intimidating to take on alone. With information sourced from the Lonely Planet API or a similar travel site, users will be able to add their own advice or declare their interest in visiting an attraction.
Wasted Time
Users are spending too much time contacting each other with few resulting meetups. I identified three approaches to mitigating this problem.
Interviewees recalled making arrangements only to have the other person “flake” or stop replying. RoamWith will have a scheduling tool integrated with the chat function to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Competitor apps are often vague about where in the world users are located, and when. RoamWith users will enter their destinations and the dates that they’re travelling, and see only users with the same itinerary. This will result in more realistic matches that are more likely to reply.
Two interviewees expressed that they didn’t mind if someone cancelled, as long as they were informed. To avoid no-shows users will be asked to confirm their plans the day before, and the app will automatically inform the other party if one person can no longer make it.
Personas
One of the challenges of designing a social networking app is that much of the user’s experience is determined by their interactions with other users, both on the app and in real life. Of course, we cannot control what goes on in a face-to-face interaction. But if we view RoamWith as a tool, rather than a consumable product, we can start to examine how to make that tool more effective, thereby giving more power to our target users.
In The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper discusess the idea of the negative persona, or the user who you are not designing for. In the case of our app where social interactions are the experience, we need to take it one step further by creating an anti-persona, a user who is actively harmful to the goals of our core persona. The anti-persona is not a villain, but has different motivations and expectations than our target persona. This difference is large enough to result in a negative experience for both parties.
Unwanted Romantic Attention
Both male and female users alike were aware of "horror stories" where women had experienced unwanted romantic or sexual attention, and believed that this impacted their engagement with the app.
Since the same conditions that afford social experiences also afford romantic ones, designers cannot expect total control over interactions between users. However, we can exert a degree of influence on which users interact by discouraging and diverting anti-personas.
Discourage
Culture and branding should present a friendly, non-sexual tone explicitly through copy and impicitly through visual design. However, there is a high potential for these messages to be ignored if the anti-persona sees the app as a valuable tool.
Divert
Add a straightforward question to the onboarding process that will divert users with explicit romantic motivations into a segregated pool. Most users who fit into the anti-persona are not villains. Forcing a straightforward declaration of intent can have two effects:
The anti-persona who answers “no” will approach meet ups with this commitment in mind and behave accordingly.
Anti-personas with similar motivations will be better able to find each other.
Next Steps
Prototype
Create functional UI using existing wireframes and finalize copy
Test
Identify any UI issues that impede key task flows
Uncover any additional user concerns or pain points
Validation interviews
User interviews should be conducted subsequent to release to ensure that the approach to each design insight is proving effective
Qualitative data from interviews should be juxtaposed with quantitative data on metrics such as questionnaire answers, successful meetings, and cancelled plans
