Travel Stories is a travel journal app that makes the journaling process easier. The main idea is that capturing just a bit of the context and details of an experience is often enough to bring back those memories. Taking the small effort to capture these moments in the present will help immortalize them in time.

Competitor Analysis

There are many apps out on the market that target similar goals and audiences, so I wanted to investigate and see how Travel Stories can offer a unique advantage.

Snapchat/Instagram Stories

Many people already use these social media platforms to share their adventures; however, these stories are often lacking in context and travel specific features to capture a complete story.

Polarsteps

This is a popular app that also does similar tracking for travel journaling. What it lacks is a way to make the journaling process easier as it mostly involves writing long responses. Their focus is more on creating a log that can be turned into a travel book afterwards.

Google Maps Timeline

This is a hidden feature of Google Maps that actually does a great job of tracking location on a timeline with photos, but it lacks any journaling features. Expanding on this timeline concept is a good starting point for a new product.

User Interviews

I conducted user interviews in order to gain a better understanding of travelers. I was actually traveling at that moment, which presented a great opportunity to interview people in my target demographic. I talked to 5 people at the airport to get their perspective on journaling.

My main research questions were to find out:

• Whether participants have tried travel journaling and any difficulties they encountered
• What aspects of traveling do they want to remember/reflect on

One way I tried to dig deeper into their thoughts was to ask them to describe a recent memorable travel experience. This was an indirect way to see what they value most about traveling as people feel more engaged describing a past experience than answering questions without context.

Some useful insights I discovered:

• Most participants saw the appeal of journaling, but could not build a habit doing it
• Visual aids such as photos helped “bring them back good memories”
• One participant valued recording feelings rather than details on what they did
• Another said they used past journal entries as a way to look forward to future plans

Persona

With the insight gained from the interviews, I put together a persona to represent my target user.

Jen is an adventurous freelancer who travels for months at a time. She desires to record her experiences and feelings before any details are forgotten. However, she has a very busy schedule, often balancing remote work with travel, so she does not have much time for writing in between.

Developing this persona helped to keep me aligned with my goals of making a hassle free journaling app for a user that is on the move and doesn’t have much time for a traditional format journal.

User Journey Map

This user journey map for the persona shows the current pain points with trying to keep a travel journal. It presents opportunities where I can improve on the experience such as giving quick prompts to make writing easier on the go. This priority was not seen in competitor apps. With the right prompts, journaling will take less time and the resulting entries can provide more value in the reflection phase.

Card Sort

In order to organize the various features and values for the app, I conducted a Card Sort activity with some classmates. The goal was to arrange these concepts into logical groups and see how they can be structured.

The interesting part of these results is how differently people categorized the groups. These differences reflect on their mental model of how they framed the problem and solution. This activity helped inform me about the user flow and priorities of the app.

Wireframes

This wireframe shows the basic flow of the application and how an external notification trigger can start the prompt flow as shown in the bottom left.

High Fidelity Mockups

These are the high fidelity mockups I created as the final deliverable for this phase.

All of the work above was originally done at the beginning of my program at Emily Carr in Spring 2019. Near the end of our program in Fall, we were given the opportunity to revisit a previous project and refine where we feel it's lacking. I chose to come back to this app and update the UX and UI design.

The changes made here are a reflection of my growth as a designer both in terms of design thinking as well as visual design skills.

Value Proposition Canvas

I used the Value Proposition Canvas to find the product market fit between the products and features I am offering and the needs of my target users. By mapping out the gains and pains along with ways to create or relieve them, I can see where there might be gaps in the current product fit.

Revisiting my product with this canvas helped me see that the old way of doing prompts did not really fit with the goals of a person wanting to record their full experiences. These prompts were too narrow and restricted the creative possibilities of journal writing.

I redesigned the prompts to focus on the goal of being quick to write while still allowing creative freedom. The suggested prompts will be based on the context of the location. The user can also enter their own if they have something in mind.

These prompts are a good jumping off point to create higher quality journal entries while avoiding writer’s block. Having both a short and long response field creates a balance between respecting the traveler’s time while still allowing for in-depth writing. Answering with a quick response while in the moment can help later kickstart the writing process for deeper introspection.

UI Redesign

The original focus in this project was on the UX process, so not as much time was spent on visual design. During this redesign, I took the chance to revisit the UI and apply a more cohesive style. I tried to incorporate common UI patterns from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines to create a modern yet familiar looking app.

The new branding strategy aims to keep the app looking approachable, yet modern. This blue palette fits more with the traveling theme and the typeface Gibson was chosen for a more humanistic, welcoming style. The logo itself was kept neutral to prevent association with any particular mood as people travel and write in different ways.