Conceiving a mobile app to help travelers have a unique experience — Case study

The travel market is a growing market (pre-covid19), and people rely more and more on technology to prepare their travels. However they are often confronted to an overload of information and have difficulties finding unique places that local would appreciate. The goal of the LeadMe application is to answer this problem by providing users with personalized recommendations for their travel according to their interests.

8 min readApr 9, 2021

I worked as a UX Designer for a 2 weeks design sprint, in team with another UX Designer. We worked for LeadMe, a startup founded by Victor Peron and Thibault Philippe, who will be launching soon their mobile application. They had the idea of the application and its possible features and needed our help to conceive a MVP.

🛫 The initial brief

The core value of LeadMe is to provide users with a set of personalized recommendations, that will be coming from users having the same interests as them. LeadMe wanted to solve the following pain points :

Users have a lack of trust in the results they find when looking for activities to do when they are traveling.
The overload of information turns into an important waste of time to select the relevant information
Travelers want to have more unique experiences.

Our goal to conceive the MVP was to validate or invalidate these assumptions, and come up with a problem statement by doing UX Research with the users.

🔍 Secondary Research

We conducted secondary research to have a better overview of the global market and the features proposed by the direct or indirect competitors of LeadMe.

The key learnings on the travel market are :

Personalized services : More and more travelers are now looking forward to enjoying highly personalized travel services.
Mobile travel apps : They are gradually gaining pace in the market and are preferred by travelers to make their travel arrangements.

📊 Gathering quantitative data

We conducted a survey, that we shared on Facebook travel groups and on LinkedIn. We had more than 200 answers who answered to the following questions:

Before covid, how many times a year did you travel to an unknown place?
Usually, how long do you stay on your holidays location ?
Usually, you are traveling with… (alone, with friends, etc)
What is your average budget for a trip (all included) ?
What are you looking for in priority when you are traveling ?
How do you organize your days when you are traveling ? (activities, restaurants, bars, visits, etc)
What are the most important difficulties to organize your days during a travel ?
In a travel mobile application, you would like to have the following features :

Here are the main learnings that we have selected from this survey :

💬 Job to be done interviews

We conducted 5 job to be done interviews while waiting for the results of the survey. The goal of these interviews was to better understand the way people travel, what they are looking for during their travel, what is valuable to them and what are their pain points.
We gathered all these insights into an empathy map. The value of an empathy map is to really get inside the mind of an user and empathize better with him/her.

We selected 3 pains and 3 gains that were the most relevant and impactful during all the interviews we did.

Key users’ motivations:

“I received thoughtful advices and tips by locals or travelers I met on my previous travels.”
“With a friend on site, you go with the flow, you’re more relaxed.”
“I like to take my time, have a little coffee in the morning, live like a local.”

Key users’ pains :

“The hardest part is finding the information we’re looking for and that will be useful for us to organize our travels.”
“It is complicated to aggregate the information found on the internet; there are 10,000 results, we can read one thing and the exact opposite the minute after.”
“When I was in Paris with a friend, we used to go out in places which are rated 1 star on Google so if he didn’t bring me, I would never have been there.”

❔ How might we ?

These insights led us to come up with our problem statement, which will be the starting point to solve these users’ motivations and pains.

We used the how might we questions, which is a very powerful tool, that helps to have actionable questions that we can answer with features.

🛴 Building our MVP

We conducted an ideation workshop with Victor and Thibault, the 2 funders of LeadMe, in order to get the most ideas as possible. We used the crazy 8 method to generate innovative ideas.

After this workshop we conducted our backlog of features and prioritized them using the MoSCoW method. We divided these features into :

Must have : These are the requirements without which a project will fail. They MUST be delivered within the timeframe. They make up the MVP.
Should have : Should have requirements aren’t 100% necessary for delivering the project successfully but they are the “most nice to have” out of the list. They may be less time critical than “must have.
Could have : Could have requirements are just “nice to have” they are desirable to provide a nice user experience or customer experience but they’re not that important to the delivery of the project.
Won’t have : These are the requirements that everyone agrees aren’t going to happen. It might be because they cost too much to implement or provide too little ROI for the efforts required to implement them.

Here are the features that we chosed to prioritize for the MVP of the LeadMe app, there are the must have for the launch of the app, based on our user research.

🔨 Wireframes and testing

We started by drawing low-fi wireframes to have a first idea of the layout. We had pretty much the same idea of what we wanted so we just took into account each other inputs the build a common low-fi wireframes.
We then moved on to building mid-fi wireframes, that we then tested by doing 4 usability tests.

✅ What the users liked :

The progress bar during the creation of the profile
The “around me” functionality
The map with filters and locations
The gauges on the location place to show the user the ambiance

❌ What we needed to improve :

Not clear who is adding the recommendations on the app
No search function
No possibility to change the perimeter around them
Profile’s information are not clear

Based on these feedbacks we iterated into a second mid-fi version, focusing on highlighting that locals were adding contents, and that the user will find personalized recommendations.

🎨 UI process

We wanted the design of the app to convey its philosophy : discovering unique places, and having a good time with qualitative recommendations.

We defined 3 brand attributes among the ones that the founders of LeadMe had thought of :

Sharing : the value of the app is that users are able to share content.
Unique : on LeadMe users won’t find top 10 locations to see in Paris, but unique places that a friend could show them.
Trendy : this applies to the design of the app as well as to the places that the app will show.

We conceived our moodboard to convey the 3 brand attributes.
It feels like good times with friends, during the summer, and featuring unique places (cool architecture, street art).
The choice of color came directly from this moodboard reflexion.

We built a style tile with these vibrant color but a minimalist approach that we and the funders of LeadMe really wanted for this app. This style tile will enable to LeadMe to build consistent design in the future.

📱Hi-Fi prototype

👋 Welcome on the LeadMe app !

The first step for the user is to subscribe, then moving on to an onboarding process which was important to present the value of LeadMe and so that the user knows why he needs to create a profile.
Once on the homepage of the app, the user will see directly the different addresses around him/her, also some personalized recommendations from the users that he has similar interests with. User can also directly sees their profiles and access all addresses recommended by these users.

The user can also access a map that will enable him either to look for a place with filters or with a search option. Once on the page of a location, the user will easily see the ambiance of the place with the different gauges evaluating the ambiance of a place. This final prototype was tested by 4 users and this was a must-have feature as they all loved it and found it very useful to project on a location.

On the users’ profile they can access their information as it will be seen by other users, but also add a place they want to recommend to other users.

🚀 What’s next ?

We presented this process to the funders of LeadMe, which they will use to develop the MVP of LeadMe. But this doesn’t stop here, because thanks to our user research we also have a backlog of features for the next iterations of the LeadMe app, so stay tuned !