THE CHALLENGE
International culture travelers need a way to have meaningful conversations because they are seeking for authentic cross-cultural connection.
How might we:
- … enable more authentic cultural connections.
- … create more meaningful one on one diaglogue.
- … enable more authentic cultural connections.
- … enable connections to broaden cultural understandings.
- … help enable a sense of belonging.
CLIENT WORKSHOP 1
The first human centered design workshop was focused on understanding the core challenge and utilized “How Might We” statements to reframe these challenges into user goals.
First client workshop focused on user goals, problem statement and “how might we.”
The team came up with three distinct 3 proto-personas including “The World Traveler”.
CLIENT WORKSHOP 2
The second workshop was an an all-day human centered design workshop to explore and align the team around the primary user type. During the workshop we identified proto-personas, a storyboard, necessary features and user flows and then used these assumptions to frame user research interviews.
Workshop Exercises:
> Understanding Your User: Proto-persona Exercise
> Understanding Your User: Storyboards Exercise
> Understanding Your User: Feature Prioritization Exercise
> Reflection
> Defining your Product: Whiteboard User Flow Exercise
> Understanding Your User: Storyboards Exercise
> Understanding Your User: Feature Prioritization Exercise
> Reflection
> Defining your Product: Whiteboard User Flow Exercise
STORYBOARD
Storyboarding was used as a critical tool in collaboratively understanding the main steps the user takes when using Voyaj.
PERSONA
After synthesizing user research we were able to build upon our initial assumptions and create a persona.
“I felt we connected heart to heart [which] validated my belief that in every person is a striving for heart to heart communication.”
– The World Traveler
WIREFRAMING: Low Fidelity
We used whiteboards to sketch out initial wireframe concepts think through the user flow.
USABILITY TEST FINDINGS
During usability testing with 6 participants we focused questions on the user’s comfort and trust in the match. Specifically how much information people felt comfortable with divulging for a connection without feeling invasive.
In order to communicate findings a report with key insights from these findings was created.
Some key findings:
- Then majority of participants said that they would be likely to use a product like Voyaj as a traveler but not as a host. So our recommendations were to create additional features with which to incentivize hosting as well as play brand messaging, and design to that.
- The majority of participants and all of the women tested mentioned, unprompted that trust and security would be a concern. To further create trust we implemented a few key security features such as verifications and notifications.
- As we suspected, the majority of users tested liked the onboarding experience but mentioned that it was long. To combat this we stripped down the experience into priority set up, allowing the user to access the quiz functionality easily through initial interface and prompts.
Usability confirmed our assumptions that the personality quiz was both a delight for the users and enabled effective matching.
THE RESULTS
The user experience design and prototyping of the MVP enabled Voyaj to secure funding for development.
Voyaj is currently in final visual design and development.
