Souvenir

Project Overview

Souvenir is a high-fidelity interactive prototype designed to create a global community platform that connects travelers and shoppers worldwide. The project accomplishes this by allowing travelers to help shoppers fulfill foreign purchase requests by leveraging unused luggage space during their trips overseas. As a 5-member academic project, I was responsible for conducting and synthesizing early UX research to understand our potential stakeholders and core target users. I was also responsible for designing and refining the user interface throughout the project.

Research

The inspiration for our project began with a common phenomenon shared by all of our group members: always asking a family or friend to purchase something for us when they are traveling abroad. To test how prevalent this occurrence is, we conducted a combination of interviews (2) and surveys (46) with respondents aged from 19 to 47. The insights from the initial research show that more than 80% of the respondents have the habit of purchasing products for someone else when they travel. In particular, beauty products are one of the most common products purchased abroad.

To further expand on this opportunity, I conducted secondary research on Canadian’s traveling frequency by looking at the Year-end Review on Traveling conducted by Statistics Canada in December 2019, where more Canadians are traveling abroad with an increase of 1.1 million trips (Statistics Canada, 2020). Therefore, we came up with the concept of turning travelers into purchasing agents.

Persona

To better understand our target audience and the core stakeholders of our application proposal, we created two personas: one for traveler and one for online shopper. Aside from the design, I was also responsible for ensuring the user scenario and content matches with our research.

Early Wireframing

Building out a set of basic wireframes to figure out composition and features was the next step. Below are the early interfaces of Souvenir:

Mockup

After a series of feedback from interviewees, instructors, and peers, we moved onto the final mockup. As one of the core designers, I was responsible for establishing a consistent design language and colour scheme, while creating many of the base components for my teammates to reuse.

User Testings

Our team also did user tests on our mockup to test variations in our designs. For instance, we debated whether or not the landing page was too overwhelming for users and created a different approach for the home page. Users were asked to think-aloud for A/B testing, which was followed by qualitative interviews for additional feedback and insights.

Reflection

Overall, the most prominent challenge was the unexpected class disruption due to COVID-19 halfway through the project. It was hard for us to collaborate, research, conduct usability tests, and prepare for presentations online. However, our team distributed work evenly by allocating each member to specific tasks according to our skills. In my case, I was responsible for the interface design and allowed other members to focus on adding interactivity. This experience allowed me to practice various methods for collaboration and research within the context of UX, as well as teamwork in general.

Below is our video proposal for the final product: