Navigation app design 

Muskaan Sehra

Product design, research, AR

Jaipur, India
Designing for social innovation

Project : Solo/Personal

Tools : Adobe XD, Miro

Overview

Tourism is the fastest growing industry in the market. We are currently living in those privileged times, where everyone is thriving on limited time. The governments are having to offer a payment to get people to cycle to work, which would have easily been a normal if it were the 1970s. 

If an average worker avoided using their car to commute just two days per week, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by approximately 1600 pounds, per year, per individually.

Design challenge

Design a route selection feature for a navigation app to encourage tourists to take more walking routes in cities.

Design Solution

My design solution is about introducing a new feature dedicated to walking tourism, that helps travelers make the best of their trip, showing them the different discoveries on their way. Allowing them to customize their journey and live off the best experience, powered by an AR platform that maintains their flow of navigation.

Features

Explore page setup:

From the suggested places, covering a distance of 2-4 km in radius vicinity of the tourist, they can choose to visit nearby destinations that the they can arrive to, on foot

Path suggestion and customization:

The user can take an overview of a new customizable walking path to their destination, that includes many attractive points that diverge from the actual path but are worth visiting, and can remove points according to their own convenience.

AR navigation

Allows travelers to enhance their navigation experience, by choosing the AR view, that offers location tags and information, language translation, and bookmarking points on their way.

Process

Although I had a lot of time to work on this project, I wanted to increase my efficiency and ability to work under constraints, so I self-implied time limitations and challenged myself to complete this project within 7 days and come up with solutions to the best of my abilities.

Day 1

Secondary research

To go through the reference and learn more about the problem, I started with some desk research. Through this research, I figured answers to topics like:

Tourists’ regular or common commuting habits
What are some agendas that tourists arrive with while visiting a new destination?
Types of tourists: Experience driven – have money to burn, thrive on experience, Money driven – travelling to cheap, cut on experience if necessary
Micro-moments that travelers go through, while go plan their entire trip
Other initiatives that have been taken to improve or favor walking tourism
What is expected of the tourism industry once the covid situation improves? 

Day 2

 User interviews and competitive analysis

Through my own research, I figured there were some points of friction in the travelling experience.

Key takeaways:

While all three interviewees were very much convinced to walk on a tour, there were personal constraints and expectations for each case
Most of their tour is highly dependent on recommendations they get about various attractions and points, either from their personal guide, or friends, trip planners and websites, or google suggestions.
They revisit a place if the experience was memorable
While tourists with a family prefer pre-planning their trip, the leisure or solo travelers choose to decide their activity after reaching their destination

Affinity mapping

Competitive analysis

Since all of my interviewees use Google maps for navigation on tours, so I myself compared and conducted a competitive analysis of popular navigation apps to see if the other apps were filling in the need.

While, catering to user needs, Google maps alone satisfied the navigation and direction parameters for tourism, the other two apps had a straightforward features to show directions to a destination only.

But the above apps offer limited chances of exploration to the tourist, guiding their journey through fixed suggestions, distracting them from the possibility of making the most of their tour through experiencing local culture and enhancing their overall travel experience.

Day 3

Defining the problem

The new question arises:

What could possibly be done, in order to fine tune the tourist experience,  allowing greater possibilities of exploration to the tourist, yet abiding by the Google maps policy for easy and convenient navigation?

On the basis of the above information collected, I decided to create two personas, that could guide my future decisions and approach, each of them defining a separate user base.

Persona 1 : free-spirited

Persona 2 : family oriented and sorted

Day 4

Ideation

Since I was designing for Google maps, I chose to work with the same approach as Google, i.e. designing for travel moments that matter

Credits : Micromoments by thinkwithGoogle 

I tried to figure out how the user would possibly react in each of the micro-moments, by setting a scenario and examining the customer journey.

Customer journey map

Scenario:

Its 5 in the evening, Chan has just reached his hotel from the airport, he’s resting and has no plans of visiting any of the places on his iterinary. But the tourist inside him, suggests for a little head out. So he thought of exploring places nearby, like some local market within the vicinity of his hotel.

After brainstorming upon the insights, picking on various design solutions, and rounds of elimination, I finalized on the present design concept.

Day 5

Paper wireframing

Before starting off with the designs on screen, I tried to draw my ideas out on paper, making a couple of sketches to give my ideas a visual brief.

Low fidelity Wireframes

Getting started by designing my first set of screens for the project, I worked around the idea of meeting the potential tourist user base in their  “I-want-to-get-away”(dreaming) , “Time-to-make-a-plan” (planning), and “Can’t-wait-to-explore”(experiencing) moments.

Dreaming and Planning phases

Experiencing phase

Day 6 – Day 7

High fidelity designs

Explore page setup:

Meeting the travelers in their dreaming moments, the app displays cards of different nearby destinations that the user can arrive to, on foot. The suggested places cover a distance of 2-4 km in radius vicinity of the tourist.

Path suggestion and customization:

Designing the planning stage for the user, the app shows an alternate walking route to their destination, that includes many attractive and tourist favorite points that diverge from the actual path but are worth visiting. The user can take an overview of this path, and remove points according to their own convenience.

AR navigation

This feature allows travelers to enhance their navigation experience, by choosing the AR view, that offers 

location tags and information whenever the user scans a view with their phone’s camera
language translation in cases of conversations, and unreadable boards and text
bookmarking points on their way, if they like to save or revisit a certain point or location

Key Learnings:

An individual’s approach

I am able to work well both in a team environment as well as taking an initiative. But I realized how productive it would be to work in a team, especially on a project like this, where the opportunities are endless, and it’s just a matter of perspectives that makes the difference. 

Setting constraints

Allowing myself to only work under certain limitations and conditions, actually helped me tackle problems in a much better way and allowed to me see where I stand in terms of providing solutions under external constraints such as fixed timeline, fixed design system, where I was challenged to seek and entirely focus on solutions, over visual decisions.

On a closing note

The above solutions are just mere possibilities, to leverage the tourism experience, that Google maps already offers. Undoubtedly, there are many constraints and decisions that need to be made, and multiple teams are involved at each step of the process, before finalizing a single tweak for release. Google employs the best minds to work on these systems, and there is surely a reason as to why certain things are the way they are.

Walking tourism is not the selling strategy for the navigations apps, but it has been in practice for quite some time and people are slowing warming up to the idea of walking on tours, not only opening doors to greater exploration and cultural experience, but also choosing a healthier option.


Thanks for reading!

Interested in some more cases I worked on? 
Portfolio: https://muskaansehra.com

Find me at : [email protected]