The Travel App
The Travel App/Furthr
The Travel App, an Australian company is a product that is aiming to become a leader in the travel spec space. They are creating a platform for travellers to organise almost all of their trip planning, in addition to partnerships with travel destinations and financial institutions around the world to provide amazing offers to people while they holiday.
Overview
My Role
I lead this project through a full UX process. From early research meetings with clients, to brainstorming sessions with some test users, and from mapping the flows to designing the final product. My role was to take full responsibility to ensure that the early stage ideas of the company, were translated into a high quality product ready for launch on both app stores.
Tools Used
The Project
This product began with the objective to create an application to disrupt the travel tech space, building a product for travellers that would allow them to organise all aspects of their journey from one location. Rather than use multiple apps.
The pandemic resulted in a slight change of direction, and the company saw this as an opportunity to encourage vacationing within a users own country. So in addition to travellers tools, users will have the ability to accumulate cash back on everyday purchases such as coffee, groceries, restaurants within the in-app wallet. They can then use this cashback to access exclusive travel and tour deals, or quite simply transfer the saved cash to their bank accounts. Both enticing shoppers to spend in local businesses and think about booking trips within their own region. This prompted a change of branding, turning into Furthr.
Research Phase
This project began at the concept stage, and so the objective early on was to spend a good amount of time conducting research into the industry and validating the idea before moving onto design and development. This period lasted almost two weeks and resulted in a document which detailed existing products, user behaviours in this space, potential for innovation and some early paper prototypes. The paper prototypes brought a visual to the idea which the clients appreciated and it was from there the vision for The Travel App began to take shape. We evaluated and made adjustments before settling a a number of features and a distinct user flow.
Wireframes
With the official sign off from the client on phase 1 of the project and the flows agreed, we began with wireframing and then design. For this project, I used Sketch to wireframe and design with the transition between both stages far quicker within the one platform.
The objective that was given to me with respect to design, was really to wow them. Lot of pressure upfront from the client, but they wanted their product to be very on trend and standard with 2019. With a long list of travel related apps out there, the company not only wanted some innovative tools, but also to have an aesthetic that would capture the eye.