EcoTravel
Overview
The recent growing awareness of environmental issues and sustainability among people around the world, especially amongst younger generations, calls for the tourism industry to increase its efforts in adopting environmentally and ethically-centered practices.
As individuals, we all have a part to play in preserving the environments that we travel to see.
EcoTravel is an app that helps environmentally-forward travelers find sustainable lodgings and experiences. It empowers travelers to make responsible decisions by providing easy-to-understand sustainability information, and opportunities to connect with a community of eco-conscious individuals.
This project was completed as part of the SMU UX Design certificate course.
Project Objective
Develop a mobile app experience that helps users find sustainable travel options.
Timeline
3 Months
2023
Role
Lead UX researcher and designer in a team of 3 UX designers. My contributions included:
▸ Performed primary and secondary research
▸ Created lean product canvas
▸ Conducted 4 out of 7 user interviews
▸ Created 2 out of 2 pseudo personas
▸ Produced user stories, epics, and workflows
▸ Created sketches, wireframes, and prototypes
▸ Conducted 2 out of 6 moderated usability tests
Deliverables
🔗Interactive prototype
Process
The Problem:
The cost of tourism on the environment
Tucked in the uninhabited island of Phi Phi Le is Thailand’s most famous beach, Maya Bay: one big coral reef ecosystem brimming with exotic marine life. At its peak, the bay received 7,000 - 8,000 tourists a day.
30 years ago, around 70-80% of the bay’s reef was intact.
Years later, decimated by incoming boats and tourists, less than 8% remained.
In June 2018, the Thai government announced that the area will be closed to tourists, in order to allow nature to heal itself.
In the following 4 years, a team of marine experts and volunteers have replanted over 30,000 pieces of coral. About 50% of the replanted coral survived.
Without the transplanting process, it would have taken 30-50 years for the reef to regenerate naturally.
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The substantial environmental toll of tourism underscores the need for embracing more eco-friendly approaches to travel. After all, the natural environment plays a huge part in our tourism experience. Whether we're skiing down a mountain, lying on the beach, or hiking through a forest, we need the environment to take that trip.
How might we, then, help people make more sustainable choices when traveling?
The Solution:
Connecting sustainability-forward businesses with environmentally-conscious travelers
3-leaf “green level” ratings & sustainability information
When browsing, users can quickly understand the sustainability level of a lodging or activity. Users can see the steps that a business is taking towards sustainability.
AR EcoGarden
Users engage in a small, rewarding experience after completing each booking.
Earn points and watch your tree grow.
Social Connection
Be green together. Users can add friends and share tips and insights with trusted, like-minded individuals.
01 Understand
What does it mean to “travel sustainably” ?
The team kicked off the project by delving into initial research on sustainability and travel to grasp a better understand our subject matters.
In summary, sustainable travel focuses on three main pillars: Environment, Economy, and Society.
Market Overview: evaluating consumer interest & identifying opportunities
Through further research into market demands and existing competitors, we discovered that while there was a substantial interest amongst consumers in traveling more sustainably, there was a notable absence of businesses that specialized in accessible eco-focused offerings.
From this, we determined that EcoTravel’s areas of focus would be on offering a curated selection on eco-forward accommodations and activities, coupled with a unique AR rewards experience.
At this point, we also developed a lean product canvas to look at how to position EcoTravel in the market and measure our success.
Understanding our users:
who is the “sustainable traveler” ?
Our team conducted 7 interviews with eco-conscious individuals and leisure travelers in their 20's - 40's. From our users, we sought to understand:
▸ Environmental awareness: environmentally friendly habits that the individual practiced in their daily lives.
▸ Travel habits and preferences.
▸ Attitudes towards sustainable travel.
Key insights from our sample of users include:
From the data gathered from our user interviews, we created pseudo personas to represent the two user groups that we found in our specific sample:
More eco-forward individuals (represented by Greta)
Less eco-forward individual (represented by Angie)
The pseudo personas helped us identify user pain points, and the key data and design drivers that may address them.
With those in mind, we determined opportunities for our product to stand out:
02 Defining the app
Our team initiated the design process with product definition and feature ideation.
Using the foundation established by research insights, we proceeded to identify major epics and created multiple user stories to inform the product features.
Developing these epics and user stories helped us gain clarity on the experience we sought to create.
After ideating product features with epics and user stories, we used the outcomes to inform the workflow for three user segments:
▸ First-time users (Traveler)
▸ Return users (Traveler)
▸ First-time users (Business)
We took this approach to further develop process steps, and identify gaps & overlaps.
For the scope of this project, our team decided to focus on designing the experience for the Traveler segments.
After several iterations, we finalized our workflow which would guide us further along the design.
03 Designing the experience
The team moved into the visual design of the app with a brainstorming session and rough thumbnails to map out user flows, as well as to explore design concepts. We further refined our ideas with sketches and wireframes.
04 Evaluate: validating the design with our users
With a mid-fidelity prototype completed, our team performed an initial round of usability testing to see how the design functioned in the hands of our users. This helped us determine design inconsistencies and usability problem within the user interface and content areas.
We established user and testing goals before creating multiple test scenarios.
The team uncovered a handful of moderate to severe usability issues during the testing phase. The top five usability hurdles our users came across include:
Confusion over eco-level rating system and the EcoGarden.
Distraction on the landing dashboard.
Unclear affordance & signifier when selecting activity times.
Confusing and restrictive coupon/rewards designs.
Conflicting mental models regarding a leaderboard.
We worked to iterate on our designs to address the challenges:
Final Design
05 Next Steps
The team contemplated some next steps we would take to refine our product if given additional time. They include:
▸ Research business (travel service providers) needs and opportunities, and build out experience for this user group.
▸ Consider consumer (traveler) - reported eco-ratings / eco evaluations
▸ Further development and resolution of EcoGarden system & AR integration.
▸ Further testing for and addressing accessibility issues.
▸ Address high-level cosmetic changes and create design hand-off for development.
Reflections
✦ Iteration over preservation:
Throughout the design process, I went through several iterations in the design, which allowed me to arrive at solutions that I would not have considered in earlier stages. Iteration taught me to discard feelings of “precious-ness” with any current design, and allowed me to incorporate user feedback to arrive at clearer and better informed resolutions.
✦ Design with accessibility from the start:
I realized that there were accessibility issues as I was building out the design (color contrast, type size and contrast, touchpoints scale, language, etc.). If I were to redo this project from scratch, I would start with accessible design from the beginning to better adhere to WCAG standards.
✦ Test and validate:
Testing our prototype with users helped me validate/invalidate any assumptions I had with my designs and approach. It was also imperative in shining a light on issues that were not immediately apparent to me as the designer who could easily be trapped in my own biases. For this project in particular, uncovering different mental models between the participants (eg: perceptions of the leader board) was especially eye-opening.
✦ Spend more time finding solutions:
Looking back, I wish I had spent more time developing more solutions & experiences that targeted the goal of helping people travel sustainably, in a more unique way. For example, an experience that allows users to search for and “bundle” their accommodations and activities by proximity to one another, thereby reducing the distance they need to travel (reducing carbon footprint). I think that by challenging myself to think outside the box, without initially worrying about if an idea would “work” or not, would have ultimately yielded more interesting results.