Making travel more collaborative
Summary
The Adobe Creative Jam series is a competition where teams design an entire app experience in partnership with a popular software company. Teams are given only a problem statement and are then sent off to ideate, design, and prototype an entire solution for that problem... all in 2 days.
It's an exhausting and exhilarating experience and it's always so cool to look back at the work you did knowing all the progress that was made in such a short amount of time.
Role
Product designer
Team
Egg & cheese croissant (Britney and I)
Timeline
April 24-26 (2 days)
The Problem
Empower families and groups of friends who travel together a collaborative way to document, organize, and share their travel experiences and stays to the larger Airbnb community.
In a mobile app, provide a way to combine photos and/or notes and transform their shared family trips into immersive stories about the culture and destinations they visit.
User Research
We created a Google form and shared it on our social media to see if we could get some responses. Shoutout to our friends and family because they gave us 84 responses to help guide our design. Below are the results.
It's no secret that any good design is rooted in research. So we knew that even though we had a very limited amount of time, we still wanted to get some data to find out what we should focus on within our design.
Ideation and design
User goals
App structure
A basic view of the functionality of the app and how a user would navigate from task to task
User task flow
One big piece we learned from doing previous design jams that it was really important to construct a narrative around the app to guide the user through the process. This made sure that they saw every part of the app and understood how the tasks would flow together seamlessly.
The storyline for our presentation and prototype is below.
Low-fi designs
A large part of our brainstorming was coming up with different low-fidelity screens to show one another so that we could get a better idea of what the other person was thinking. This allowed us to combine our individual ideas together and create a fusion of our original thoughts.
Style guide
Because Britney and I were working on different pieces within the same document, we wanted to ensure our individual designs were cohesive with one another's by creating a design system and style guide. We created components that we could just drag and drop without having to worry about our some of our pieces looking different when we put all of the designs together.
Prototype and presentation
Because this was such a timeboxed event, we unforunately didn't have time to receive feedback on our low fidelity designs. Therefore, we went straight from the few sketches that we had made into designing our final prototype.
Final designs
Presentation of final prototype
We were elated when we found out that we were finalists for this design competition. As a finalist, you present your prototype on a livestream to three esteemed judges from the respective company hosting the competition and all the other creative jam teams that tune in.
Below is a clip from the live stream of our presentation. This gives a good walkthrough of our app through the eyes of a user.
Judge's Feedback
Overall, the judges really seemed to like our prototype. They applauded our ability to create an excitable and innovative experience through a data-driven approach. The scavenger hunt feature did turn out to be a huge success and impressed all three judges — they really appreciated the use of gamification to go sightseeing but at the same time create content within the app.
Some critiques we received were to rename the app to make it a little more specific so that the user knows what they are getting into before downloading. They also mentioned altering the design just a bit to give more emphasis to the hero functionality of the app, whatever that may be.
Results
We won!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉
See our big moment below.
We are legitimately still in disbelief over winning this competition. There were around 360 submissions from the US, UK, and Canada and out of everyone we were the winning team. In addition to bragging rights we each won $500 in Amazon gift cards + a free 1-year subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
This was such an incredible experience all around. I'm so thankful to Britney for allowing me to be a part of her team and for tackling this whole competition with me. We have proven that two air signs work well together even with long hours and very little sleep. ♒♊