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Overview
Buddies Abroad is a mobile app concept designed to help study abroad students find travel buddies within their academic institution who are of similar travel styles and interests. The onboarding process includes a short personality quiz, and the rest of the app follows a match-making app format.
Role
This started out as a group project with 3 other people. Together, we conducted user research and concept ideation. All wireframes, mockups and prototypes were created by me.
Duration
4 months
Empathy
We started the empathy phase by sending out a survey to students at DIS Abroad Copenhagen, a study abroad school, asking what their main concerns were for the upcoming semester. We noticed that several students were concerned with travel-related things, so we used this insight to guide our questions when conducting interviews.
Each of us interviewed 3 people. I interviewed 2 current students from DIS, as well as an alumni. Afterwards, we reconvened and looked over the findings. Though each person we interviewed had varying travel experiences, here are some recurring sentiments we saw:
"I think what made it such a good trip was the company."
"I wish I had traveled with someone else."
"It's really hard to get everyone on the same page."
Define
Next, we synthesized our research findings to come up with our final problem statement. We created an empathy map to organize our thoughts and relate to our user.
After some discussion, it was apparent that students were concerned about who they were traveling with. We concluded that the people you travel with have a greater impact on the trip than the destination itself, and came up with our final problem statement:
"How might we connect DIS students with like-minded peers to travel with to ensure positive and impactful experiences?"
Ideate
Once we had our problem statement, we started brainstorming solutions. My team started with a quick and silent 15-minute brainstorm. Then, we stuck our post-it notes on the white board, explaining our ideas as we went so we could build off of each others' concepts. We came up with a wide variety of ideas ranging in practicality and seriousness, including Travel Buddy Roulette and the Myers-Briggs Travel Preference Test.
After coming up with as many ideas as we could, we began sorting them by category and picking out the most practical ideas. From there, we each voted on our favorite ideas and narrowed it down to 3 - a forum app, a match-making app, and a social gathering service.
Prototype
From our top 3 ideas, I decided to move forward with the match-making app concept. I began by making a list of features I wanted to include based on our research and interviews. Then, I made a simple flowchart before drawing wireframes of the key pages of the app.
Once I had my wireframes, I made a rapid, clickable prototype in Adobe XD. Then, I asked some DIS students to test it and give me feedback.
Final Product
I received feedback regarding the layout and specific features of the app. Users wanted to see a filter feature, as well as the ability to create groups and leave reviews on each others' profiles. I incorporated these suggestions, and here are some screens from a redesign of the high fidelity prototype:
Takeaways
The biggest thing I took away from this project was an appreciation for team work. While working with others can pose its challenges, each team member brings an invaluable skillset to the project. Having teammates not only lessens the load on each individual member, but it also creates opportunity to find new solutions and see new perspectives. I did not appreciate this fact until my teammates were abruptly taken from me.
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