INTRODUCTION
In the previous milestone, we came up with 3 different design ideas based on the findings from the preliminary research. At this step, we defined our target audiences as solo travelers who need in safe navigation and recommendations as they explore cities by themselves, so we tried to enhance their travel experience by addressing a solo traveler’s challenge using a pervasive device. During the interviews, we found several different types of challenges from our interviewees: navigation issues, safety concerns, limited budget, desire for local information and carrying luggage issues. Therefore, we broadly considered all these challenges during ideation process in milestone 1, rather than focusing on one specific challenge.
Since we explore broadly about design ideas for different challenges, we felt that we need to narrow down which problem we want to address for travelers. We also felt that target audience should include group travelers like a couple travelers as well as a solo traveler because group travelers also have similar needs with solo travelers. For milestone2, we conducted diary studies and cultural probes to have a better sense of travelers' challenges during their trip and to re-scope our project. After conducting research and interpreting data, we decided to focus on improving travelers’ experience by addressing current navigation problems they have and by promoting interactions between travelers. With these refined target audiences and project scope, we proposed three design concepts which will be illustrated below.
IDEATION AND SELECTION
In our research findings, one of the most common issue that travelers have raised is that they don’t want to overuse their digital maps and their phone for navigation. For solo travelers, they feel like this behavior brings more attention to thieves and thus expose themselves to danger. For people traveling with their loved ones, constantly looking at maps take away their ability of interacting with their partner and thus making conflicts easier to occur. However, most of our interviewees do travel with a plan or certain interest in mind, whether it’s shopping, or site-seeing, or exploring good restaurants, so having a travel experience that fulfills their need and at the right moment is important for them.
With these insights, we brainstormed ten possible solutions to solve travelers problems from different aspects and decided on the following five criteria to evaluate our solutions.
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Non-intrusiveness: The design should not block users’ senses, distract their attentions, or interrupt their interactions with other people.
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Context-awareness: The design should provide insightful recommendations and suggestions according to different traveling contexts.
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Meaningfulness: The design should care about travelers’ diverse needs and interests.
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Better Travel Experience: The design should provide users better traveling experiences and enrich their journeys.
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Feasibility: The design should have the potentials to be prototyped and tested.
In our original brainstorming session, we came up with a wide variety of solutions including self-driving cars, interactive toys for travelers, and badges to find companions while traveling alone. However, as we evaluate them based on our research findings and the criteria we set for ourselves, a lot of them were eliminated, which lead us to the final three solutions
Cultural Probe Study
After gathering the diary study result, we did a short interpretation session to synthesize the results. As we were interpreting the results, we realized due to the long time span of the diary study there are areas such as navigation that haven’t been fully explored so we designed a cultural probe study to look into that.
We’ve set our goal for this research to understand how travelers navigate to their intended place for a single day in their trip. To derive more insights from our users, the study involves the following key artifacts:
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Preliminary Survey:
Asking about where they’ve traveled to, which area they stayed in for one of the most eventful days, who they traveled with, and the duration of the trip. This preliminary survey’s main purpose is to gather the place they traveled so that we can prepare the map of the area they explored during a part of their trip which is the key probing item to facilitate the research. This also helps us effectively eliminate participants who’ve traveled not very recently and thus might not be capable of remembering the detailed information we are interested in knowing.
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Map of the City:
We used the map of the city as something to trigger our participants' memory and have them map their route throughout the day while asking questions to understand their route in more detail.
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Stickers:
We also created a wide variety of stickers that are tailored for travel context which involves information that we are interested in knowing more about such as possible places they might pass by such as coffee shops or devices they might use to probe them to think back on their trip.
We recruited two participants (one male, one female) who just returned from a fall break trip to a major city that they’ve never been to before and conducted the study.
Cultural Probe Kit
Study Result Map
STUDY DESIGN
Research Questions
Before we jumping into conducting research, we came up with research questions that would guide our study. There were four main categories we would like to understand more about: general challenge, planning trip behavior, navigation, and logistics. The study questions under these categories are as following:
1. General challenge:
What are the biggest challenges during the trip? How do travelers overcome it?
2. Planning trip behavior:
How do they plan their trip? Did they change their trip plan? What factors change their trip plan (safety, losing the way, etc.)
3. Navigation:
What makes a reliable navigation information? what information are travelers looking for on the street, on the signs, and on the maps?
4. Navigation:
How backpackers navigate themselves during the trip? (google maps, physical maps, guidebook, etc.)
5. Logistics:
What objects (either digital or non-digital) do travelers carry around during the trip? Do travelers have any of wearable devices during the trip? How do you use them?
Diary Study
We designed diary studies to have a better sense of travelers’ challenges during their trip, especially in order to get the responses to our research questions. We recruited 3 participants through friend’s networks. We strived to recruit as many people as we can to obtain more data, however, it was difficult to recruit participants who are actually in travel during our research period (two weeks). Therefore, lack of demographic diversity of our participants (2 female Taiwanese and 1 male Indian) is the limitation of our study. However, the travel areas where our participants traveled are pretty diverse and interesting in terms of continents of countries (Japan, Israel, and Spain).
Due to the nature of our study, it was hard to meet participants and give them physical diary study packages in person, thus we communicated with our participants using digital log methods and video call. Participants are asked to record their trip and upload photos for two to four days of their trip, using digital log tool, Tripcast, or tools whatever they are comfortable with such as Facebook or google drive. There was a detailed instruction for participants to tell them what kind of photos and record we are looking forward to. After gathering all required records and photos from our participants, we conducted a follow-up interview to understand better about their travel experience based on their records.
Instruction for diary studies
STUDY RESULT
After the study, we used empathy map to interpret the data. Based on what our participants say and do, some needs in terms of features and usability we drew are as follows.
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Need a good place to relax. It can be a cafe, hotel where they stay, beach, or any place they can relax. (Context-awareness)
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Food is important. They have different strategies to find a place where they will go to (Google trip, google map, Instagram, Yelp, etc.) However, sometimes it is painful and time-consuming.
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Most travelers heavily rely on their phone for navigation and tips, specifically Google Maps.
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Participants traveling with companions prefer less intrusive way while using navigation maps. (Non-intrusiveness)
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Solo travelers need to keep their senses clear to stay cautious of the environment. (Non-intrusiveness)
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Out-of-date current local information makes it hard to navigate around such as road construction, bad road conditions, blocking, etc. (or protest)
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Shopping is an important part of their trip but is hard to plan ahead or immediately find places that have things they like.
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They have specific needs on navigation i.e. to avoid unsafe area, to avoid bad road, to find good restaurants
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Phone storage is important to some travelers since they use a phone to take pictures throughout their trips.
On the other hand, according to what our participants think and feel, some needs in terms of deeper meaning are as follows.
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For group travelers (couples, friends), minimizing distractions or facilitating their interactions with each other seems needed.
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A perfect travel experience exists in a good balance between taking a short rest and having fun.
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Issues with maintaining internet access/phone access make travelers anxious and nervous.
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Many complain about a packed day which they would either prefer not doing it again or plan the rest of the trip less packed.
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Participants who are traveling with their significant other are all very wary of their partner's emotion and needs, and had at a certain point mentioned conflicts because of different preferences, travel styles or planning issues.
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Travelers are willing to make sacrifices in time and money to ensure safety and convenience.
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Interactions with traveling partners make the trip more interesting.
Empathy Map and Interpretation
REFINED SCOPE AND CONCEPTS
Glasses
To provide a more customized navigation without shouting out "I am a tourist.", we came up with the idea of navigation glasses which can be connected to a phone for setting up. With different needs of everyone, some value the safe route more than anything else while others may prioritize the starred locations on Google Maps. As a result, we figured that people can customize the augmentation criteria, either the starred locations, spots of high ratings, safe route, restrooms, etc. On the other hand, users can also specify things they are not interested and would like to avoid. For example, some cobblestone streets may not be accessible or friendly to those visitors who are carrying their luggage.
One important thing is we want to make it non-intrusive, which means appropriate amount of information is the key. So the navigation information may only show up when users should be about to take certain actions. After the action is taken, the info will disappear on the glasses. To attain that, it also uses icons, colors and lightnings to give navigation instead of pure text.
Wristband
This solution is inspired by one of our interviewee’s for the cultural probe study, who mentioned having a good experience because her partner was using Apple Watch’s navigation instead of Google Maps, where it will only notify them when they need to turn. We want to incorporate that interaction but include more features that also solve for the safety or restaurant finding needs that travelers also value.
We designed this wristband with its main functionality as navigation, where it will have a simple screen, GPS, biometric sensors and bluetooth connectivity. It will be integrated with an app in the phone such as the main setup is still in the phone, and the wristband will only be giving simple instructions and navigation as a less intrusive way of enhancing travel experience.
Users can setup the places they definitely want to go to and things they are interested in noticing and would like the wristband to notify them about, then just set off to their trip. The app will automatically plan the route so that the navigating is leading them to attractions that are close to them and that they are heading towards restaurants at around meal time. There’s also a button on the wristband so that the users can toggle between navigation mode and free roaming. It will also notify travelers if they are walking towards area with relatively high crime rates to prevent them from encountering danger.
This solution was selected as one of our final three because it works well with the criteria of being non-intrusive, context-aware, feasible, and enhancing travel experience. However, how meaningful it is to our users could be something that we need to further explore, especially since there are already a lot of existing wearables that can simply extend their functionality to work similarly.
Emotion Sensing Ring
In order to solving the traveling partner’s communication problem and having a better understanding of others’ needs, we designed a ring that can detect users’ heartbeats, breathing, walking steps, and location. If someone feel too tired or hungry, the partners’ rings will keep getting warm, remind the partners to slow down, and ask if they need to have a rest. If the device detected the users have not had the meal at the regular time, it will also send out a reminder and suggest users to find a restaurant. The device can improve the communication between travellers, and remind travelers to take care of partners’ situations. It can also remind travelers to have appropriate rests and keep healthy during the trip. The ring design will not block travelers’ senses, and it considers users’ needs by bio-sensors. With the ring, travelers can be better aware to partner's’ situation and adjust their paces, so they can better enjoy the trips.
CONCLUSIONS
In this milestone, we conducted three diary studies and two culture probes. We found travelers highly rely on their smartphone and digital maps for traveling information, and they care about traveling partners’ needs and emotions. We brainstormed to find ten solutions, and selected three ideas based on the five criteria: non-intrusiveness, context-awareness, meaningfulness, feasibility, and better traveling experience. We decided to focus on the scenario of walking on the street, and designed for both solo and group travelers. For the next step, we will collect the feedback for these three ideas, and select one to conduct preliminary ideas testing.