I designed the activities and cultural games flows in addition to conducting user research and testing.
While in-flight magazines inspire about various destinations and local lifestyles, they don't inform customers about their next destination. As vacation travel begins to pick up over the next year, travelers will seek to discover more cultural inspiration and crave curated experiences.
How can the in-flight time be productive and personalized to the passenger such that they will learn their destination’s culture, attractions, dining, and more prior to their arrival?
Create an informational app for itinerary building and entertainment
Many apps aims to make travel-planning easier before and during the trip. However, there are very little resources dedicated to in-flight passengers, making this niche audience a great market opportunity to expand on.
Learn about your destination from a local's perspective
Update your itinerary with bookmarked items
We interviewed three college students who fly and travel often with family to learn about their typical planning process and travel priorities.
Based on our insights from user responses, we deduced that our app should be:
Entertaining: This ensures that passengers are actively engaging with it rather than casting it aside like they do with in-flight magazines
Effective: It should help users learn about their destination while keeping them occupied during their flight.
Informative: It should give users all they want to know about their destination and more before they reach their destination.
We began brainstorming features that would meet all of our product criteria:
Users can enter a specific destination to find location-based activities, history, and other information.
Passengers can explore the eateries and attractions around them and further filter results using the implemented category tags.
Users can learn more about their destination’s history, art, and traditions with videos and articles.
Users can stay entertained and be enlightened through culturally informative games.
After determining the key features we wanted to include, we created a user flow to map out the user journey.
We sketched out various designs to include based on our interview insights. The main features we agreed on were:
A slide-out menu gives us a cleaner and larger space to display interactive activities and additional information.
An image-based card system captures our audience’s attention whilst presenting information visuals and scannable text.
A list view easily displays categorized information, while a grid enforces a neat and organized layout despite the amount of information on the page.
As we digitized our lo-fi sketches, we redesigned several elements to better fit our audience and problem statement.
We changed the hamburger menu for easy access between all channels. This also helps our senior users clearly see the docked menu on every page rather than having to search for a “hidden” slide-out menu.
The floating email button became a fixed button placed in the middle of the screen to reduce accidental taps. This ensures that users won’t prematurely send the list to themselves before they’re done reviewing it.
We combined the destination activities and locations pages to consolidate the user flow as both topics often go hand-in-hand.
Once we completed the mid-fi prototype, we conducted three usability tests to make sure our target audience could navigate through our app. Our users included parents and a college freshman.
From these tests, we found:
As we finalized our designs, we created a design system for a more cohesive aesthetic and brand identity, focusing on our goal of inspiring users to connect with their destination on a deeper level.
Brand Style
Round and Friendly
We rounded harsh corners for a more friendly aesthetic, ensuring users that their trip, like their browsing of ViewPoint, would go smoothly as planned. Our icons, from the Adobe plugin Icons 4 Design, were simple, universal, and followed a similar aesthetic to create a consistent design system.
Colors
Blues and Orange
The blue represents calm and serenity, putting any worries users might have about their trip at ease as they explore their destination, and the orange represents enthusiasm, encouraging users to step out of their comfort zone to check out the exciting things ahead.
Typography
Lato
We chose Lato because this sans serif typeface follows the clean, simple, and friendly branding of ViewPoint.
ViewPoint elevates the in-flight experience by providing information on a flight's destination, from local eateries to cultural and historical information, and culturally-informative mini-games. The variety of features allows adults to add last-minute itinerary items and keep kids entertained during the flight.
We worked on ViewPoint to take a break from another project. While it was refreshing to start a new unrelated project, it was difficult keeping up with both at the same time. This experience helped me understand the importance of breaks and the risks of project burnouts.
Because this was such a rushed process, we forgot to save previous drafts, building over our mid-fis instead. This led to a lack of process documentation and made the case study a bit difficult. But, this was a great reminder to always document your checkpoints.
