03 DEFINING MY PRODUCT
Target Audience

My users revealed key insights that clarified my understanding of scope and direction. I felt confident in defining my product, and began with crafting a persona.

Jake is a young professional working at an LA Business Analyst Firm. His passion resides in his love for traveling with friends and close loved ones. He often travels with a close friend and prefers to plan only big-ticket items, leaving the rest up to "winging it" and recommendations from locals or friends. He enjoys finding "hole in the wall" establishments and little pockets of culture not found in your typical travel guide. Forming relationships with Locals are his key to finding points of interest and things to do. Too often, however, he finds his GPS and smartphone unreliable when searching for simple directions and obscure items or locations of interest. He yearns to learn something from his travels, be it about art, his friends, or even himself.

04 IDEATING SOLUTIONS
Forming Concepts

At this point, I had a good grasp of the high-level problem. Travelers like Jake need a way to meet locals in order to find unique travel adventures. My early concepts focused on this understanding. I ideated mobile concepts, using 6-8-5 sketching, that connected users with locals. I turned to popular booking sites like Airbnb, and current travel industry standards like Lonely Planet for patterns that could inform my concepts.

Lonely Planet used dots on a visual map to indicate different activities, and had great information on specific cities and their histories.

Airbnb had an intuitive booking calendar that made picking dates easy.

Airbnb also had a detailed accommodation page. LocalGuide needed to emulate this level of detail and clarity.

07 FINAL DESIGN
Hi-Fidelity Prototype

I implemented my light UI across the rest of my mid-fidelity screens after receiving positive feedback. During the implementation, I also addressed critical areas of opportunity that arose during mid-fidelity testing. One crucial feedback point I addressed included a redesign of the central “recenter-user” button to a location similar to Google Map’s material design model. I built a functioning prototype using a combination of Sketch, Craft, and InVision before placing it in front of my last round of users.

INVISION PROTOTYPE

07 FINAL DESIGN
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

I received overall praise for my execution and level of fidelity. However, there were minor points of usability that needed addressing before delivery. These included questions around my bottom nav, and it’s lack of copy, as well as the lack of edit buttons and user icons on the map. These were addressed before delivering the final hi-fidelity wireframes.

I delivered my wireframes organized in user flows to increase clarity and negate miscommunication during handoff.

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08 Conclusion
Reflection

LocalGuide was my first digital experience project and was a breath of fresh air to design at such an agile pace. My biggest takeaway from working on LocalGuide was just how similar the digital design process is to architectural design. It not only reinforced the constant need for iteration, but showed me the value of putting users first.

One key translatable skill that informed LocalGuide’s success was my ability to develop and understand digital information architecture. The ability to think of design as a system, a network of components and inputs that form a whole was a crucial skill taught during architecture school and in the profession. My ability to grasp LocalGuide as a summation of screens, color, icons and user flows allowed me to develop and synthesis LocalGuide quickly and effectively.

Overall, LocalGuide opened the door to digital design for me and reinforced that despite my shift in discipline, my skills were not only transferable but a decisive stepping stone into digital experience design.