Placefinder app
Placefinder is an app that helps people find places to visit. This is a speculative project that I created as a student at General Assembly's 10-week UX Design course.
Intro
The initial problem I wanted to solve for was that users don't have an easy way to find or save recommendations from friends and family on places to visit. Additionally, they might not know what locations their friends have visited, therefore they would never know to ask them for recommendations.
My idea was to create a space where users can easily look up and save recommendations on places to visit from people they know.
User research
I conducted surveys and interviews to find out the challenges that people experience to visit and how people currently find places to visit. I discovered that the real problem in finding places to visit were the cost, distance, and location, not whether or not they were recommended by a friend or family member. Additionally, it seemed as if reviews and recommendations were still influential, but not a top deciding factor. Below are some quotes from my research.
“It can be tough to trust recommendations that I find online.”
“If it’s going to be a drive to get there, that will decrease the likelihood of me going.”
“If it’s something social, I’ll consider someone’s recommendation. If it’s something you can do by yourself, I don’t need someone to recommend it.”
“Finances are the biggest factor for me. I don’t always have vehicle access or money to visit an establishment.”
Persona
With the above factors in mind, I created a persona to reflect the research. The persona helps give context to the data so the design can be tailored to the target audience throughout the process.
Annette loves hanging out with her friends and going to new places on the weekends to take a break, relax, and have fun. To decide what places to visit, she looks at reviews online and asks her friends for recommendations. However, sometimes she cannot afford to visit these places. Another problem she has is that some of these places are too far from her apartment and she doesn’t like driving very far.
Motivations:
To relax
To experience new things
Goals:
To be able to visit places
To be able to afford to visit places
To visit places recommended by friends
Frustrations:
Doesn’t like driving far
Doesn’t like spending a lot of money
Interests:
Hanging out with friends
Going to theme parks
Relaxing at the beach
Visiting museums
Trying new food
Ideation
After creating this persona, I did some ideation sessions with classmates to come up with features that would best match the persona. The features that I picked were a filter for price, a filter for distance, and a good deals notification/coupon.
The storyboard below depicts how this app might be used by the users and how they interact with the product.
User flow
The image below depicts the path that the user would take while using this app.
Low-fidelity wireframes
Below are low-fidelity wireframes I created based on the user flow.
User testing
After I created clickable low-fidelity wireframes, I asked users to test them out. These were the insights that I found from user testing.
Organize the Details page with clear and consistent headers
Add distance and location to search results
Add a recommendation button
Add a phone number
High-fidelity prototype
With the user testing results in mind, I created a high-fidelity prototype.
Clickable prototype
Below is the clickable limited-functionality prototype I created in Figma!
Closing thoughts
The initial idea I had for this project changed to a slightly different direction based on my user research. I learned that it's really important to design to the needs of your target audience instead of designing for yourself. Additionally, the ideation and rapid prototyping sessions I had with other classmates were valuable to come up with different ideas in a short amount of time. Moving forward, I would love to add more features from the ideation sessions and user testing including a profile section, more categories and price filters, a saved search function, and a comments/reviews area.
Instructors: AnnaZulma McFadden, Cristi Cambrice, and Hannah Rosebraugh