Journey

design project for WHACK 2022

Overview

Role: UI/UX design

Duration: 2 days (11/12/22 - 11/13/22)

Skills: Figma

Team: 3 designers

Background

The theme for WHACK, Wellesley College’s hackathon, for 2022 was connection and wellness: growing and recovering in a post-COVID world. While at first our team thought in terms of wellness, we eventually brainstormed a practical approach for helping connect in a post-COVID world. Travel has been heavily impacted by COVID, which has affected international connections people may have with their friends and family. In the post-COVID world, travel has remained complex with varying COVID restrictions depending on the country. This was the birth of Journey, an app meant to detail COVID restrictions and visa requirements by country, allowing you to keep track of restrictions and requirements in a checklist for each trip the user plans to make.

Goals

  • Have an onboarding process that allows our app to tailor their restrictions to the user’s COVID vaccination status and passports.

  • Provide a breakdown of COVID restrictions and visa requirements by country.

  • Keep track of requirements that need to be fulfilled via customized checklists per trip.

  • Provide access to making embassy appointments through the app.

With the features that we wanted in mind, we first began with some preliminary design sketches for different features of the app. My primary focus was onboarding, in which I created multiple different versions of onboarding screens in an attempt to see which version would better present the information we needed to know in order to best tailor information on the app to the user.

Design process

Through being able to set up appointments with embassies, we differentiate ourselves from a profit-focused app and instead establish Journey as a public service. Rather than web-scraping the latest COVID information or providing a link to an embassy website to set up an appointment, our ultimate goal is to consolidate all the aspects of planning a trip in the post-COVID world, which would involve communicating with many different bureaucracies. In an ideal world, Journey is a shared service for everyone that unifies countries.

From our sketches, we then created a high-fidelity prototype. We decided on a monochromatic color scheme with a light blue accent to make items easily readable and give our app a professional look. We also gave Journey a simple icon of the globe to represent its purpose as a travel-oriented app.

For our onboarding process, we provide many options for travelers to input their COVID vaccination information and passports in order for them to receive information from the app that is accurate to them as possible. The “my trips” section allows users to save and access their checklists. When a trip is created within the app, it will come with the relevant checklist for COVID and visa requirements for the traveler. Within these checklists, the user can set up embassy appointments or COVID appointments if needed.

Project presentation

Key takeaways

  1. From my experience working on this project, I learned the importance of creating a cohesive design system early on in prototyping so that the design stays consistent even with multiple people working on different aspects.

  2. We had a lot of different discussions in particular about how to implement the checklists and trips on the app, and through this I learned how to better communicate my ideas to my team.

I think our project had a very unique outlook on the prompt given that differed from many other projects in this hackathon. Overall, this was an excellent learning experience and I was really proud of our team for being able to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time!