Company
Tourzee
Role
Lead UI/UX Designer
Software
Miro, Sketch, InVision
Team
1 Product Manager
2 Designers
3 Developers
1 Project Manager
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Overview
The Tourzee app offers travellers a platform where they can find and take tours in the location they are at, directly from their phone. Their experience would be in their hands, without having to worry about meeting up with other people or keeping up with a tight schedule. It would also allow tour guides to upload their own step-by-step tours and earn passive income.
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Groundwork
We worked on this app as the last project for a UI/UX certification at Dev Mountain. My team got paired with three developers and one project manager to make our choice of app happen. Our product manager had the Tourzee idea for a while and had already done a lot of legwork for it (survey and interviews). As a traveler myself, I jumped at the idea of bringing it to life. Our biggest constraint was time however, with two weeks for design, and two weeks after for development.
Defining MVP + User-flow
We met with our developers and discussed the feasibility for making the app’s prototype happen in the 4-week timeline we had. After discussing tools and resources our dev team would need to acquire and figure out within that window, we had to leverage our expectations and leave some of the more engaging features for a later iteration. Given the app would ultimately cater to two different personas (travelers and tour guides), we opted to also focus on the traveller’s path to present a glimpse into the user’s experience to help us sell the potential of the app.
I took a stab at developing a user-flow in Miro for the purpose of focusing our limited time in an efficient manner. I used my experience redesigning websites and their content to give as much direction as possible so my teammates could visualize what was needed on each page. It also helped further our discussions with the dev team as we dived into mockups.
UI Design
After figuring out kinks with the developers, and aligning on mockups and content, I developed a very basic UI Kit after making a few high-fidelity screens for Tourzee. I also took a stab at a very rudimentary branding style to make the app feel more genuine. Keeping in mind my teammates had limited experience with design tools, I prioritized making assets easy for them to grab, drop, copy and edit, and I would finesse their designs to ensure cohesiveness from screen to screen.
We met our 2-week design deadline with an InVision prototype we presented to instructors and colleagues, and we then handed off sketch files and assets to our developers.
What’s Next?
I’ve been recently approached to pick up this project again with another team of developers, and I’m excited to resume collaborating on it. Without our tight schedule however, I’d love to go back and tangibilize the initial survey and interview responses into a persona, as well as to conduct more research into tour guides, since we hardly had any data on them.
