Itinerary App

I worked on a team to prototype an app to encourage college students to interact more with their surrounding environment. I used human-centered design to conduct user research and testing, perform heuristic evaluations, and produce several iterations of our mobile application prototype. 

 
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PROBLEM SCOPE

Although Cornell students are interested in interacting with the community outside of campus, a number of barriers keep them from doing so.

 
 
 

CONTEXTUAL INTERVIEWS

Interviews with an overarching target audience (Cornell students) helped increase user empathy and hone in on these barriers.

We wanted to address the problem by designing a solution that minimizes barriers and facilitates Cornell students integrating themselves into the Ithaca community. The resulting affinity diagram reflects students’ values, barriers, and experiences through theme narratives:

 
 
 
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PERSONA

Meet the persona, Josie. She is working on balancing her social life with her academic life. 

 
 
 
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FEATURE REQUIREMENTS

Students want to find out information without spending the time to find it.

With academics as a priority, students don’t want to spend excess time planning non-academic activities. They are only willing to participate in atypical social events or travel to new locations if it is easy to do so. An app that generates and manages itineraries meets our feature requirements defined for our users.

 
 
 
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DESIGN SOLUTION & PROTOTYPE ITERATIONS

An itinerary app that suggests new locations is (surprisingly) uncommon and suited our persona’s needs.

Using our solution, the user should, at a minimum, be able to complete the tasks in our task architecture to achieve. We used the Gestalt Principles to design paper prototypes of itinerary app screens that correspond to our user values.

 
 
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A simple task architecture

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HEURISTIC EVALUATION

A heuristic evaluation yielded 36 suggested design changes related to clearer terminology, more user control, and adjusted features. 

Nielsen’s list of ten usability heuristics guided the evaluation of our mid-fidelity prototype. We had a total of 36 suggested design changes, of which I noted 14. Here is a sample of the evaluation:

 
 
 
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FINAL DESIGN

We tested the Sketch prototype regarding the usability metrics effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, emotional engagement, and social connectedness before settling on a final design.

 
 
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CONCLUSION

I would have liked to approach our problem from a wider perspective, but unfortunately we were unfortunately limited by the nature of the course. However, the concept of our app holds promise in expanding to larger markets — there are many scenarios in which newcomers to a location would benefit from a generated personalized itinerary.