Project
WING WOMAN – An app for solo female travellers
Date
2022-2023
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher, UI Designer, Visual Designer
Tools
Figma, Miro, Mural, Invision, Maze, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator)
Encouraging, empowering, and enriching the female solo travel experience through UX design
Overview
Solo travel is a transformative experience for women, leading to self-discovery and feeling empowered, enriched, brave, free, and in control. Even still, the female solo travel experience has barriers and constraints that make women hesitant or even unwilling to participate in solo travel.
This year-long research project further investigated what enhances and hinders the solo female travel experience, and results from that research helped to directly shape and create WING WOMAN, an app for solo female travellers that focuses on trip planning, safety, and community and aims encourage, empower, and enrich women’s solo travel experience.
This project also investigated if the UX design of a mobile app can influence women’s feeling of empowerment and, more specifically, help women have a more enriching and transformative solo travel experience.
The app was designed using a bespoke empowerment-focused design methodology. Usability testing was used to determine if implementing empowering UX principles into the design affected their feeling of empowerment and their overall user experience. Results found an overall increase in user empowerment and a positive user experience among participants.
The following case study details the design and development process of the app. The full research paper detailing the literature review, methodology, design process, and findings can be found here.
Literature Review
First, I performed a literature review focused on 4 main areas.
The Rise of Solo Female Travel
Solo Female Travel & Empowerment
Solo Travel Motivations & Constraints
How mobile phones are changing travel
Analysis of Competitor Apps
Empowering Design Principles
Empowerment & Choice
Empowerment & Participation
Lack of research on non-solo travellers
Geographical constraints
Onboarding
Solo Female Travel
Research overwhelmingly found that solo female travel has become more and more popular in recent years due to change in women’s socio-economic status & freedom from gender norms. It is widely regarded as a vehicle of empowerment for women but there still sociocultural, personal, practical, and spatial travel constraints.
Designing for empowerment
Choice and participation are crucial elements of empowerment. Several different empowering design principles were studied, and these would become the backbone of the project, especially when it came to deciding on functionalities of the app. Research found that onboarding was one of the aspects of empowering UX design, but there is a lack of research on what makes good onboarding and how it can be used to give users a sense of empowerment.
Mobile Tourism
Research also found that mobile phones and travel-related apps are changing the way people travel. However, existing apps provide poor user experience and don’t address all solo travel barriers.
Research gaps
There are gaps in existing research in solo female travel – most research only studied women who had already travelled solo before, and most research had geographic constraints.
Methodology
There is currently no design methodology that focuses specifically on user empowerment, so for this project I created a bespoke design methodology combining elements of User Centred Design, Empowering Design Principles, and Participatory Design.
User Centred Design + User Empowering Design
User centred design ensures the focus is on the users of the product, and not the product itself. It focuses on usability and UX design, and not necessarily user empowerment. User empowering design ensures the 4 dimensions of empowerment are present: meaning, choice, impact, and self efficacy.
To ensure that user empowering design was implemented during this project, user centred design ideology was used in conjunction with empowerment principles found in research. There was also a focus placed on user choice and control as a vehicle for empowerment.
Participatory Design
Participatory design aims to directly and actively involve users in the research, design, and development process of a product. This helps users feel more empowered, giving them choice and control and allowing them to have a direct say in what they want the product to be and decide how a product can work best for them.
Participatory design was implemented during this project through questions in the online survey that prompted users to brainstorm potential features they would like to see in an app for solo female travellers, and with a remote co-design workshop.
What are the biggest challenges facing solo female travellers?
What features are needed on an app for solo female travellers that will encourage and empower them to travel solo?
Understanding the Users
Most of my user research data came from a remote survey, which had 768 responses from women in over 44 countries. The survey consisted of both open- and close-ended questions investigating solo travel barriers, motivations, likes, and dislikes. Responses showed very obvious and evident trends and themes. The survey included a participatory design element, giving participants a chance to brainstorm ideas of what they’d like to see in an app for solo female travellers that could enhance their solo travel experience.
Also, 3 interviews were conducted with subject matter experts in both solo female travel and empowering design with some insightful takeaways. Additionally, 2 solo female traveller groups on Facebook were analysed to find common themes surrounding solo travel motivations and constraints. A common trend found across posts was women traveling or wanting to travel for big life events, both positive (birthdays) and negative (divorce or bereavement). Another common trend was women asking for advice while planning a trip, inquiring about other women’s experience with safety at certain destinations, or expressing how nervous they were about travelling alone.
Overall, the user research showed clear key user pain points and needs when it came to solo female travel.
Doing what I want, when I want
Freedom
Alone Time
Meeting people
Only being responsible for myself
Safety
Loneliness
No one to share the experience with
Dining alone
Cost
Defining User & Design Requirements
Personas helped bring the user and their needs to life and served as the foundation of all future design decisions to ensure the design process continually remained user-centric.
Affinity diagrams helped organize and group the qualitative data from the survey into themes that were then matched to empowerment principles. This would be the basis for the app’s functionality and features and ensure that they were aligned to the ultimate goal of empowerment.
A competitor analysis was conducted with various travel resource, safety, social, and trip planning apps to understand how other apps were addressing similar issues and to measure them against aspects of empowering UX design.
Co-Design Workshop
To incorporate participatory design and foster user empowerment, I held a remote co-design workshop with 4 participants. The 2-hour remote workshop was done through Miro and consisted of 12 activities designed to involve the participants in the Design Thinking Process. They performed a series of brainstorming activities, a card sort, a crazy 8s exercise where they sketched out app screen ideas, and they were even given the opportunity to brainstorm the app’s colour theme and name.
Their ideas would end up being directly implemented into the final product, allowing them to have a direct say in the design and development of the proposed app. Read more about the co-design workshop in detail here.
The Design Process
After all exploratory research methods and the co-design workshop were conducted, and user and design requirements were defined, it was time to bring this app to life. I decided that the core app functions would be: Safety, Trip Planning/Exploration and Discovery of destinations, and a Community of solo female travellers.
Once core functionality was decided, proposed task flows and screens were quickly sketched to begin building information heirarchy and visualising the path users will go through to complete a particular task.
Those foundations were then further built on with low-fidelity wireframes. They guerrilla tested to uncover any issue with the prototype or features not being where the users were expecting. Then, unmoderated usability tests were administered using Maze to identify problems, uncover opportunities for improvement, and learn how users interact and behave with the app.
Creating a Visual Identity
I created moodboard with common UI patterns found in similar apps and inspiration for the icons and illustrations to visualise the desired look and feel. The app colours and name were taken directly from the results of the co-design workshop, and the rest of the app’s visual identity was built around that.
Iterating to Understand What Works & What Doesn’t
With this new visual identity and feedback from the wireframe testing, I began designing high fidelity prototypes that would allow me to test the key user tasks I identified in my research. Two rounds of pilot tests were conducted with the initial iterations of the high fidelity prototype, and I was constantly updating and refining the prototypes based on user feedback, and with a focus on implementing empowerment principles.
The full application of the UI revealed that while the tasks remained relatively straightforward, some elements warranted reconsideration. I ironed out kinks in the prototype, simplified layouts and iconography, streamlined language, ensured buttons were clear and legible, and built out additional pages.
I created 2 versions of the final iteration prototype to run A/B testing on a customisable onboarding feature.
Testing & Feedback
I ran remote and unmoderated A/B usability testing on 62 participants (31 per group) to get feedback on the app overall, and to compare the empowerment and user experience scores of users who tested version A – the prototype containing traditional onboarding, versus version B – a prototype containing a customisable home screen feature introduced during onboarding. The users were asked to complete 5 tasks designed to take them through the app’s key features and complete a pre- and post-test survey.
Although the customisable app screen feature neither provided a better user experience, nor make users feel more empowered compared to traditional onboarding, testing results did show an overall increase in user’s feeling of empowerment before and after using the app, meaning that the app did succeed in making women feel more empowered to travel solo.
The qualitative feedback from testing also had an overall positive response from users. The most common positive aspects and negative aspects of the app, as well as the most commonly suggested app improvements, can be seen below.
The final product
The WING WOMAN app focuses on trip planning, safety, and meeting and connecting with other female travellers.
Users can browse destinations and explore activities, hotels, sightseeing, etc. They can also see a feed of stories and posts from other solo female travellers about that destination, as well as its ‘Solo Safety Score’ – what other solo female travellers have rated it in terms of safety. The app also provides quick access to destination information, like information on local customs, travel advisories, a language translator and phrasebook, a currency converter, and suggestions from other female travellers on popular day trips and routes.
Users can create trips and build out an itinerary from within the app, and share their itineraries with family or friends so they can feel more safe.
A ‘Community’ feature allows users to connect and meet up with other female travellers. ‘Hangouts’ allow users to join in on someone else’s plan or create a plan and women nearby to join. Users can also browse a newsfeed of posts from others, or ask and answer questions in the Forum. The app will also connect users to others with similar itineraries, who are or will be at the same destination at the same time to connect and make plans with.
Lastly, users can access a range of safety features, including an alarm, a quick dial of local authorities, finding safe walking routes, and having quick access to emergency medical services. Users can also share their live location with family in friends in case of an emergency, and access a ‘Safety Map’ of their live location.
Here are key screens from the core features, as well as the prototype and video walkthrough of the final product!
Conclusion
Solo travel is a transformative experience for women, leading to self-discovery and feeling empowered, enriched, brave, free, and in control. Even still, the female solo travel experience has barriers and constraints. So, I set out to create an app specifically for solo female travellers that would address these concerns.
By understanding who these woman are and why they were having problems, and by giving them an opportunity to have their voices heard and to have a direct say in the design and development of this app, I was able to create an app that succeeds in empowering them to travel solo by providing them the tools to plan trips, connect with other solo female travellers, and stay safe on their solo travels.
The desire to travel solo and for an app that would help them to do so, and the importance of safety and being able to share experiences with others while travelling, came through in the research and testing. This informed a unique app that directly addressed these concerns and succeeds in empowering users.