Tubby

A Travel Companion App for People with Visual Impairments

My Role

Design the user survey questions
Create user journey map
Create high-fidelity prototypes
Write sample dialog for the voice agent
Test the function of the voice conversational agent
Edit the presentation video

Tools

Figma
FigJam
CapCut
Zoom
Google Docs

Duration

Sep 2023 ~ Dec 2023

Skills

User Research
In-Depth Interview
User Journey Map
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Wizard of Oz Testing

12,500,000 people with disabilities travel per each year.

85% of these people face barriers when traveling.

How Might We optimizing the travel experience for people with disabilities, especially individuals with visual impairments, by easing their physical and digital barriers?

Empathy

We used three main methods to empathize with our target users and understand their frustrations and needs during travel.

User Interviews

To gain insights from individuals with visual impairments and mobile disabilities regarding their travel experiences, we started by creating an interview script.

We successfully scheduled two interviews, one interviewee with visual impairment and the other with visual and motor disability.

We held one face-to-face interview and one online interview through Zoom.

Secondary Research

To gain a more comprehensive understanding, we choose to combine secondary research as a supplement resource. Our sources included youtube videos which introduce blind people’s daily lives, online articles, and research papers of disability groups’ travel barriers.

We organized our secondary research findings in FigJam file for further summarization and classification.

Competitive Analysis

We analyzed existing travel-related websites and divided these websites into four categories:

We checked the websites’ accessibility settings and if the websites are screen reader friendly.

Hotel part of the competitive analysis

Define

We voted among team members to identify the pain points that were most significant to our users in their online and offline traveling experiences.

We concluded six main pain points:

Information overload: Websites have a lot of irrelevant information like ads or complicated layouts that distract visually impaired users from the core task.
Inaccessible maps: maps are hard to use for visually impaired users.
Invalid screen readers: Screen readers and keyboard navigation are not fully applicable on some applications/websites.
Lack of accessibility information: Hotels do not openly display accessibility information which forces users to spend extra time fact-checking.
Vague accessibility filters: Accessibility search filters are not flexible enough and cannot fulfill disability users’ needs.
Inconvenient transportation: Travelers often have to spend extra time and money to find a safe, convenient, and accessible transportation method.

Based on these findings, we created a Persona for our travel companion app.

We mapped out the pain points onto the travel process to get a holistic view of what the user journey looked like. Through this process, we were able to refine and prioritize our focus.

We found that the frustrations faced by our users not only spanned the planning phase, but were also distributed in the whole travel process.

Before they start traveling, they need to book flights/hotels and make travel plan. After they arrive at the destination, they need to find accessible transportations.

Ideate & Prototype

In our ideation session, we had each team member brainstormed several sketches based on our user journey and core features.

Then, each of our team members made a paper prototype of the main user flows, include booking a flight, booking a hotel, adding a spot, and looking for a travel guide. We held a critique session and provided precious feedback for each other’s ideas.

Test & Iterate