BANSARI SHAH
Easy Vacay
A very large number of travelers begin to plan their trips by researching and choosing their destination.
It is difficult for travelers to make their destination choice because of the various options available in the market.
Easy Vacay is a design solution that provides a fully immersive and interactive virtual environment and helps travelers make easier choices while planning trips. To facilitate trip planning, Easy Vacay considers users' schedules and flexibility to suggest destinations based on estimated travel time.
Project duration: 4 months
My Role: User Research
Conceptualization
UI Design
Visual Design
Usability Testing
VR App development
Project Type: Group
Research Question
How might we help people in finalising destinations while planning their trip?
Research Insights
Success Goals
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Encouraging: Impress users with an exciting and smart design solution
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Efficiency: Personalized results to make the selection process easier
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Valuable: Provide feature to use selected destinations for future
Design Solution
Easy Vacay is a Virtual Reality(VR) application that provides suggestions of places a traveler can visit within his or her available time. The user can interact within the virtual space and perform actions to shortlist destination choices to plan trips easily using the smartphone and a VR Headset.
Consider Stela's journey as an example:
Task flow one/Selection process for destination
Stela is thinking about planning her next trip but she is not sure about the destination. So she launches the Easy Vacay application on her smartphone after connecting her VR headset. The first screen shows the logo and instructs Stela to press any key by tapping on the VR headset or clicking on the VR controller. Then the World Map appears which has interactive destinations. Stela selects California to explore more about it.
Task Flow one/ Selection process for destination
Task flow two/Select days and explore the suggested places
Stela selects 3 days as she wants to spend 3 days in California. After her selection, the places which can be visited in3 days in California are displayed in the form of different panels. Stela reads the panel description and selects Monterey to explore it in a 360-degree environment.
Task Flow two/ Select days and explore the suggested places
Task flow three/Add destinations in the personalised list
Stela likes the virtual experience of Monterey and 17 miles drive. So she adds both of them into her list by clicking on the "Add" button places in each 360-degree video. Once she is done adding the destinations, she clicks on "Return" to go back to the main menu to see her list.
Task Flow three/ Add destinations in the personalised list
Task flow four/Use the personalised list for trip planning
She clicks on the "Come back to view your list" Panel on the Main Menu and sees her selected destinations. She can see the total count of the destinations besides the button called "List". Once she clicks on the "List" button, the name of the destinations appear. Then she clicks on the "+" button to see more details about the respective destination. She clicks on the "Send" button to send the list of her selected destinations to her email. At last, she clicks on the "Exit" button to leave the application.
Task Flow four/ Use the personalised list for trip planning
Design Decisions for
Success Goals
To achieve these three success metrics: Encouraging, Efficiency, and Valuable, we took several design decisions which include a new technology called Virtual Reality(VR) and simple User Experience.
#Encouraging
Impress users with an exciting
and smart design solution
Easy Vacay is a design solution that uses an emerging technology called Virtual Reality as the main platform. It does not only provides a sense of being in a different place but also allows users to feel like they have 'got away from it all'. On top of that, it helps travelers plan their trips.
#Efficiency
Personalized results to make the selection process easier
Easy Vacay provides the feature of exploring the destinations virtually as well as allows users to select any destination to make the personalized list. To make a personalized list the user has to click on the "Add" button only.
If the user directly jumps to see the list without any selection then the user will be directed to explore places and make any selection.
#Valuable
Provide feature to use selected destinations for future
With Easy Vacay helps in further trip planning as the personalized list of selected destinations can be saved and send it to the user's registered email-id for future trip planning.
My Process
Research
Usability Testing
Design
Development
Prior art research
User interviews
Usability testing with different users with the paper prototype
Usability testing with VR Application
Brainstorming
Affinity Mapping
Wireframing
Prototyping
360-degree videos
Developed UI Designs
Developed functionalities
Developed the whole User flow compatible with
VR Headset
Research
Prior art research
For the research, we started reading articles, blogs, existing solutions for trip planning. That helped me to understand the key points to consider while designing the Virtual Reality(VR) application.
Prior Art research
User interviews
The targeted group of users for our project was anyone who wants to travel. These informal interviews gave us the opportunity to understand how these people think about traveling.
We asked general questions for travel planning.
How do they come up with a plan?
How do they get inspired to plan the trip?
What are constraints or concerns while planning?
Hypothesis for user interview:
“People want to travel, but need a clearer picture of what their journey will look like before they arrive".
Feedback:
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Dependency on online resources for trip planning is higher.
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Time availability is an important factor in choosing a destination, as they are always short of time, yet they want to explore more.
Conclusion:
We came up with the solution of categorizing destinations by the expected time to visit those places.
Usability Testing
To understand the user’s point of view regarding the virtual reality environment, we performed two user testing with a paper prototype.
Setup for initial testing with a paper prototype
Feedback:
Got the gist of being in a virtual environment.
Help in holiday planning, especially when he had not yet started planning his trip.
This application could be suitable for people who can not go out and visit places.
Average time to use the application:
10-15 minutes
Pictures taken while doing the initial user testing
Design
Brainstorming
We put our ideas on paper and sketched them, to understand the end-to-end flow of this application. This step helped us to define the product's workflow.
Affinity Mapping
It is a business tool to organize ideas and data. We started by putting our ideas on sticky notes and voted individually to finalize the main focus and features of the application. The idea which has the maximum number of votes was finalized for the application.
The output of Affinity Mapping in order to sort out and finalize our features
Wireframing & Sketches
Before starting to design the actual workflow, digital versions of finalized sketches and workflows helped us to fix the structure of the application.
Early sketches of our application
Wireframing
Prototyping
It is challenging to create in a 360-degree environment, as one's focus is not only on the 2D screen but on the entire space around the
user’s vision.
User flow of Easy Vacay
Color:
We settled on a color palette in shades of blue, green, and black.
A hard jolt from reality to VR can cause feelings of motion sickness. To reduce motion sickness, we have faded blue and green shades into black.
Bright whites and vibrant colors should be used in moderation because the increased light is more tiring for the eyes. We have used white only for the text.
Fonts:
In a 3D space, it is important to place fonts approximately at eye level, as the position of the viewer is fixed and defined in advance with 3D headsets. Easy Vacay maintains a font position perpendicularly to the observer.
Font style:
Title: Lato-Bold
Description: Lato-Thin
Logo:
The logo has a big circle which represents earth and the man wearing VR headset shows the use of the technology virtual reality(VR). The line which passes around the earth and the man represents traveling around the world. The overall logo is designed to represent the objective of helping people to make their trip planning easier.
Development
360-degree videos
We had to make sure that the videos were 360-degree VR-compatible. We used the GoPro Max camera on-location to shoot content. Our main objective when shooting was to optimize camera position, tripod position, and lighting.
Using the GoPro Player, we stitched our 360-degree videos together and edited them in Premiere Pro.
Developed UI Designs
We took design inspiration from various Unity asset store GUI (Graphical User Interface)samples, existing VR applications, blogs, and posts related to VR user interface design to design and develop the UI for Easy Vacay.
Developed functionalities
Simple Navigation for different screens
Integrated 360-degree videos in Unity game engine
Global Map
creation
Add, Return, Next buttons functionalities
Save the list and send an email to your account
Save the list and send an email to your account
Functionality for "Exit"button
Developed the whole User flow
compatible with VR Headset
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Whole User flow of Easy Vacay compatible with VR Headset
The second round of Usability Testing
After creating our virtual reality application in Unity, we did remote user testing with a software developer who was familiar with VR. The user testing process was done using a Samsung Gear VR headset, a Samsung Smartphone, and a TV monitor.
Feedback:
The flow of the application was understandable with the buttons and the panels. It definitely helps in making decisions about where I should travel.
Suggestions:
The screens are flat and floating in the environment, which makes me feel like there is no point in having a 360-degree environment with these screens.
Pictures taken while doing the final prototype user testing
Another Usability test after incorporating the suggestions
We created a 360-degree ocean reef, which matched the layout of the background of the application and added it to all scenes. Then we did the user testing again with the same user to evaluate the difference.
Result:
The difference in his experience was visible, as he tried to stay balanced and walk over the ocean reef. The user was happy to experience the 3D environment in the virtual world. He enjoyed the user flow better than he did in the previous user testing.
Pictures were taken while doing the second round of final prototype user testing
Challenges
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Use of Mapbox SDK to create a global map
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360-degree video preparation and editing
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Functionality to add the destinations in a list
Solutions
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Switched to the 2D Graphic Map and made it interactive
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Ordered and used a new GoPro max 360-degree camera instead of Insta 360 and stitched it in iMac (32 GB).
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Learned the basics of C# to develop the functionality using Unity manuals, unity Q/A portals, youtube tutorials.
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Virtual User Testing because of Covid-19 Pandemic and VR Headset dependency
Easy Vacay
