UI/UX DESIGNER, BRANDING LEAD

FLY-2-RIDE

March 2024 - May 2024 | DSCI250: Data Visualization in UI/UX Design

Many people have experienced transportation and mobility issues in the greater Los Angeles area. For my final project in DSCI 454: Data Visualization and User Interface Design, we were tasked with identifying and interrogating specific mobility issues and how they impact the people interacting within city ecosystems, working within a group of three to propose and develop a concept that works to solve a mobility challenge of our choosing.

THE CHALLENGE

We spent 7 weeks working on Fly-2-Ride, an airport kiosk that makes exploring, comparing, and navigating to travel destinations easier for travelers visiting Los Angeles.

THE PROPOSAL

MY DESIGN PROCESS

Define → Research → Ideate → Build → Test → Refine → Reflect

communicate the MOst effective transport options to touristS¹ arriving at lax²?

HOW MIGHT WE

Define

(1) People who are not from the LA area, (2) Los Angeles International Airport

My team interviewed 6 potential users over the course of a week to validate our problem space. These interviews validated the motivations we ascribed to our provisional personas- our target audience’s main priorities are safety and efficiency in their travel journey. They want a sense of predictability when it comes to traveling out of LAX.

PART 1: INITIAL INTERVIEWS

Research

We had a couple of main takeaways from this initial stage of interviews:

  1. Most young people are unaware of the public transport options available to them out of LAX.

  2. People find the current representation of available options to be confusing and convoluted.

  3. People who are unfamiliar with LA and are here for travel want to search thematically.

PART 2: PErsonas

After consolidating results from our interviews and secondary research, we decided to design our solution for two main personas: the Explorer and the Navigator.

Ideate

INITIAL BRAINSTORMS

We began ideating how our users’ journey might look, brainstorming scenarios and how our product might provide a solution. This led us to develop a guiding user flow that we started our initial designs from.

Our initial user flow focused less on discovery and more on catering the travel experience to users’ needs. This is something we ended up changing after further user research. We developed some initial wireframes to lead our design direction going forward.

Build

KEY FEATURES

We developed a design system to guide us in making the prototype, so that our wireframes were similarly aligned both visually and structurally.

Interactive prototype

My team tested our prototype on 8 users over the course of a week in order to understand where the major roadblocks were with our product and how people were using it. We had one major takeaway: there was too much information condensed into one or two pages in the flow.

USER TESTING

Test

After organizing our user feedback, we implemented minor adjustments to the layout of each page, but made two big changes to the flow, noted below.

CHANGES IMPLEMENTED

Refine

The importance of initial research stages

We learned a lot about the process of coming up with a problem statement and how to make sure it is actually addressing a need through interviews and secondary research. This helped us ground our project in a problem we all felt passionate about, that we knew people needed a solution to. 

How to implement branding and design systems across a product to build consistency

The making of our design system was an especially great learning moment because it allowed us to bridge our different design styles into one cohesive prototype. 

The process of & learning from usability testing

Our pilot and user testing was definitely one of the most rewarding parts of the entire project. To see our product being used and understood by a user was amazing. But, to also see where it broke, and became hard to understand, was equally important- it opened our eyes to pieces of the product we needed to change. 

MAJOR LEARNINGS

Reflect