TourEase

After the Covid-19 pandemic, travelers are starting to explore the world again and local small businesses and unique localities need support to bounce back to prosperity.

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Track 2: Travel

Inspiration

Tourism has the power to promote local culture, provide employment opportunities and support small unique new businesses. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, small businesses were severely impacted in the tourism industry and approximately 1 in 3 small businesses had to close with 43% of owners stating the crisis had a severe negative impact.

Moreover, tourists flock to well-known and recognized attractions in every major city, while a city’s small businesses and unique localities are ignored. According to our survey findings, 57.1% of participants struggle with finding specific destinations that are specific to their needs and preferences such as finding a small vegetarian restaurant in an unfamiliar city.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, travelers are starting to explore the world again and small businesses need support to bounce back to prosperity. Thus, we aim to create TourEase, a mobile app that assists tourists in planning out their journeys and brings exposure to the "hidden gems" of a destination.

Our design team took inspiration from a variety of sources including popular existing apps for travelers like Airbnb, Wanderlog, and others. We looked for features within these apps that performed well and explored how we could incorporate similar features into our app design for the best user experience possible. We used this inspiration to organize our information and how it’s presented on our app user interface.

What it does

  • Displays recommendations of the “hidden gems” of a selected destination (e.g. lesser well known restaurants for popular food items representing local culture)

  • View each recommended place's rating, number of gems (how much of a "hidden gem" the place is), accommodations, reviews

  • Customize an itinerary based on user's selected events, destinations

  • Share/edit an itinerary with accompanying party as collaborators

  • Easily Take, Save, and Share Photos of Each Journey

  • More!

How we built it

  1. Brainstormed ideas on an online document
  2. Sent a Google Form Survey of 11 insightful questions asking our peers about our problem space within the tourism industry
  3. Gathered the data and made user stories
  4. Wrote down all the features we could think of and organized them into different screens
  5. Assembled a mood board for inspiration and another for the style guide
  6. Organized a user flow for our mobile app
  7. Created low fidelity digital wireframes using Figma and divided the screens
  8. Peer Reviewed each wireframe
  9. Designed the high fidelity prototype using Figma

Challenges we ran into

We experienced difficulty narrowing down the scope of the features we want in our app. Initially, we wanted to add extra features such as gamification of traveling to different unique destinations. However, as we built our MVP, we realized the gamification aspect had to be prioritized after designing the core functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For all of us, this is our first designathon! We are proud of building the unique customizable user journey where tourists can build their own plan according to their own needs and preferences. Moreover, we are satisfied that our app tries to bring more deserving exposure to local businesses via the recommendation feature and the potential impact it could have on future tourists’ perceptions of local culture.

What we learned

We learned a lot about empathy during the design process. When designing a travel app, there were a lot of potential user pain points such as information overload, need for disability accommodations while traveling, how tourists and locals would define a place as a “hidden gem” and much more. We were able to test out our high fidelity prototype through usability testing and addressed all of these pain points.

What's next for TourEase

Our next goal is gamification of the app where users can earn gems or badges for traveling to specific places. This would encourage more people to visit lesser known leisure events or places that strongly represents the native culture and makes for an enjoyable experience.

Built With

  • figma
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