Travel App -TravelBud

Project description: There are many existing holiday booking sites are website that offer a range of suggestions for tourist attractions in different counties around the world. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with these, the whole User Experience is quite generalised and impersonal to the human interacting with the site.

What I feel that many companies do not take into account was that users on the website are different ages, enjoy different hobbies/activities and most importantly, want different holidays — Which is how I came up with the idea for TravelBud. TravelBud is an app where the user has their own personal avatar who recommends activities and things to do for them on holiday.

Platform: Mobile App

Project brief: Design and prototype a travel related application.

Skills: Prototyping, UI Design, UX Design, User Research, Illustration, Branding, Wireframing, Interaction design, Iconography.

Toolkit:

Project Goals

• Design a travel-related mobile app with a pleasant UX.
• Develop my design into a working prototype.

Obstacles I overcame

Simplifying the screens to make them more user-friendly

After my first feedback critique, I realised the importance of spacing. Originally, I had put all the three screens collecting users information into one screen. However, as shown in the process photos on my blog, the screen was very cramped and made life more difficult for anyone using it. After wanting to increase the size of the on-screen options, I moved the gender, age category and hobbies screens into three separate interfaces — making the icons far bigger and therefore more clickable. I felt this improved the overall user experience on the application.

Designing aesthetically pleasing cityscapes

The main focus. With this being my first ever app I had designed, I was undecided of what exactly would work well and what wouldn’t. So I found myself experimenting quite a lot with different aspects of the screens. Some of the things I changed were; the font to ‘Raleway’ which is a nice sans-serif — eligible for users to read, the spacing between the content and training my eye to achieve the right complementary colours. After doing these things I felt that I overcame the obstacle of originally not tailoring to the user's needs and ending up with an application that was a pleasant user experience.