Rome2rio iOS App Case Study
Rome2rio is a travel planning website. Our job was to design features for its Mobile trip planner for an iOS Device. We started with meeting the CEO and technical Lead at Rome2rio’s office in Richmond, discussing project requirements and scope. Speaking with the business stakeholders about what Rome2rio wanted to achieve was a great way of understanding how the company works, what its core business models are, and what makes it unique in a market full of travel websites and apps.
Click on this link to view final prototype
Our Process “Double Diamond”
Our team decided to inculcate the Design model approached by designers across multiple disciplines, the Double Diamond process was mapped by the British Design Council.
Initial Stakeholder Engagement
The first meeting with the technical lead Mark, helped me understand the technical limitations of their team. We decided to use the existing infrastructure of the product and improve on that.
Discover
The discovery stage comprised of the research, especially looking into contextual enquiry, client Brief overview, user research, competitor analysis to observe how others are approaching this, or what is the behaviour of the users in the current market, interviewing people from different backgrounds to find out how they approach planning for travel.
We interviewed 10 people for User insights.
Once I had the data from research, the next step was to analyse the information by creating an affinity map, the primary purpose for that was to observe the trends. Human beings don’t have the best short term memory, but our spatial memory is excellent, when we look at the affinity map, our brain navigates through the data to find trends.
Define
Looking at the Affinity Map, the trends gave us insights. These insights could be anything, ranging from pain points, desires even behaviours when travelling. We created a persona who better defines attributes of our users.
We narrowed down to two key insights and went on to build upon that:
- How do people build their itineraries?
- How do people organise their travel information?
The next step was to synthesise this data from insights into a problem statement, which came out to be as follows:
How might we help people plan, book and manage their entire itinerary?
Develop
The first step after we entered the second diamond was to determine a Minimal Viable Product also called an MVP, for this we mapped out a Prioritisation Matrix.
This matrix guided us to pick up the strongest trends and insights, falling under the High Priority and High Expectation section, leading to determine User Stories or goals that our users want to achieve.
- As a traveler I want to be able to plan a multi location journey so that I can have all my information of transport in one place.
- As a traveler who’s going to visit many places I want to able to see and compare my transport options at one place so that I don’t have to search them one by one.
Reflecting directly our whole Discover process, that consisted user research and insights, the next step was of Ideation.
We employed Crazy 8’s as an ideation method, I took a divergent thinking approach, together with empathy for the user, technical limitations, business needs, research and insights to ideate an MVP, iterating it gave us a solid design to be tested out in the form of Paper prototype.
The final paper prototype is a result of at least 4 to 5 iterations, the reason why we first did prototypes on paper is to get rid of our assumptions by user testing several times, before we get into high fidelity clickable prototype, the idea was that if we fail, we fail fast! I wanted the design to be both useful and usable. We validated this by user testing and iterations in our design.
Deliver
I created a style guide keeping in mind the brand identity of Rome2rio, making sure that we can utilise existing infrastructure of the current assets in the app and improve that to come up with brand new feature.
Designing the digital prototype on Figma was a collaborative process, I worked on different sections of the design, from procuring UI assets to creating new assets in respect to the brand identity, and testing it out the prototype in the end to weed out any remaining bugs.
Final Stakeholder Engagement II
For the project presentation our stakeholder Mark from Rome2rio was present at GA, he was very happy and invited us to his office to present in front of the whole team of Rome2rio.
It was quite overwhelming for me to facilitate the presentation of our findings at Rome2rio’s office, the team of more than 40 people and a primary stakeholder the acting CEO of the company. Taking a lead to answer the Questions at the end, I cultivated an ongoing relationship with the digital marketing manager, sharing a more detailed report to potentially improve their product.
Please click here to check our final digital prototype:
Further Development
- To be able to access ongoing itinerary offline.
- To be able to organise all booking and itinerary information in one place.
- To be able to retrieve and add booking information that were made not using Rome2rio.
Our further scope of development that addresses the research and user stories is that it intersects with the original brief that was handed out to us by Rome2rio on day 1, it meant that users who want to plan their journey want exactly what Rome2rio is trying to develop.
I am very proud of my team on what we have achieved together, couldn’t ask for more.
Meet the team:
Thank you for your time and for the patience that you made it this far :)
Please feel free to ask any questions that you may have.
