Travel Collaboration Tool
Designing a system with Tangible UI and Graphic UI to assist traveling groups in planning and managing their itinerary.
DETAILS
Duration: 4 weeks
Project Type: In collaboration with Tara Lin and Tash Baird
Role: Personas, UI/UX Design, Product Video production
Skills Strengthened: Tangible User Interface (TUI) design, Graphic User Interface (GUI) design, motion animation, interaction design, video editing and special effects
Challenge: My group was to design a multi-media prototype a “Tangible Tool” with both Tangible and Graphic UI that enables a small traveling family to productively collaborate together to plan a trip. The main tangible tool will 4 features of our choice, and a physical object from the tool must also have at least one additional function and can be used as a wearable during the trip. The device cannot have a screen or touchscreen. The design principle was to create a digital tool that integrates natural human gestures, more than just clicking and swiping your thumb.
CONCEPT
This Tangible Tool helps small groups, in this case three sisters, plan a trip together. The main functions are identifying and prioritizing sites, seeing distance between sites, creating a schedule, and editing the schedule with a wearable during the trip. We wanted to create a tool to aid in negotiation, discussion, and planning.
On the trip, the user's wearable pointer will glow to indicate it is time to do his/her activity as planned, and he/she can use it to edit the group’s schedule at any time with the permission of other family members (by placing every members’ phones). This allows for flexibility in schedule adjustments and recovery from user errors.
Process: Personas + Scenario
For the first one to two weeks, my group consisted of just Tara and I. We started brainstorming by creating personas for the “family” vacation our story would be centered around. We felt that a group of three would be an ideal size for our demonstration of the tool.
However, later, when Tash joined our group, we decided to change the characters to make the dynamic more relatable. Our new family of three were represented by our group of three classmates, but in the story we pretend we are three sisters who want to go to Tokyo, Japan together for a total of three days. We were able to put in travel activities based on our real personal taste, which was fun and made us wish it was a real holiday!
The main issue the three sisters have is that each have their own interests of sites to see and visit, but all of them are stubborn. They have always been bad at negotiation, and want to have a platform where they can fairly create an itinerary that placates everyone. This is the scenario we took into consideration when designing and focused on for storytelling.
Activity Prioritization & Visualization Feature
Our tool requires users to first do some individual research and find locations they are interested in on their mobile device. From there, the Tangible Tool syncs and generates one location for one pointer; each person is allowed five. Next, they can personalize and prioritize their locations. If any people have the same location in common, the tool will call attention to that with animations. This may give leeway for negotiations further along the line by showing common interest.
Once decided, a large map will show up with the geography of the locations. Location circles and pointers with two or more colors indicate that multiple people are interested in that location.