TravelGuard is a travel information app that delivers full official restrictions and rules for most countries in the world during pandemics. The user can upload their personal information, the app will generate the results of whether the user may/may not enter the country if does, what information they need to prepare before the entry and what they need to do after entering the country. This app is targeting both males and females aged 18-45 years old with all kinds of occupations.
Team
Nancy Wu, Kara Chen
My Role
Visual, Interaction, Research, Development
Duration
November 2021 - December 2021
Background
The COVID pandemic was spreading over the globe in the winter of 2019 in a very short time. People went all the way through. From the confusion at the beginning to the resistance towards quarantine, explorations of vaccines, and acceptance of new policies and regulations.
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People still remember what they desire the most during the time of quarantine: going outside, visiting friends and families, having a meal in their favourite restaurants, travelling to places they’ve never been before...all of these activities were limited in the quarantine life.
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Now with the development and prevalence of vaccines, people are able to go out and explore the world again. However, the pandemic is impossible to be eliminated in the near future. It’s necessary for people to take responsibility for their own health conditions and surroundings.
In the quarantine time of COVID, people were limited to:
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Visit friends and families
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Participate outdoor entertainment
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Travel
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User Research
User research entails deeply knowing consumers and their problems from their point of view, as well as empathizing with them. This will be achieved by conducting user interviews.
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To conduct user interviews, the next step was to create the surveys to find my target users' pain points and frustrations. I have interviewed 5 potential users.
Here are the statistics of the responses which I received from the survey:
User Survey
User Interview
User interviews are critical for understanding the users' needs from their point of view.
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I created a guide with a collection of questions to understand the user's challenges: their experience, requirements, expectations, and so on before I began the interviews.
Here are the questions I asked during the interview. I then asked them follow-up questions based on their answers, making it flexible to the situation.
1. Tell me about yourself (including occupation, nationality, residency, age, and education level)?
2. Describe how the pandemic affected your holiday plans over the last year?
3. Could you describe the recent information searching experience that you did for planning your travel?
4. Tell me the resource you use for searching the information?
5. Why do you choose this resource/ method? What made you trust that?
6. Have you considered finding an app that helps with the information research?
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After designing the questions, I did a 1:1 interview with five participants that I selected from the survey via a virtual setting. The five participants I decided to interview provided me with a wealth of information.
The interviews did give me facts that I had not considered, and the users' unique experiences with the searching process as well as their concern of COVID-19 shocked me. My interaction with my users and the questions I asked them improved with each interview.
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Empathy Mapping
Using the information collected from the interview and survey, I drafted an Empathy map.
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Empathy mapping comes in useful at this point for incorporating learnings and research notes about my users learned from the user research data. It supported me in gaining a clear understanding of the user's thinking, emotions, and behaviours when researching travel information.
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User Persona
Rebecca Lee
Age 45
Occupation Housewife
Location Tokyo, Japan
Goals
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Travel to visit family
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Stay with family members during this difficult time
Frustrations
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The government's travel restrictions are continuously changing, it is hard to keep updated
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I am poor in English, I can’t fully understand the information provided by the US government
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I want to know accurate travel regulations
Bio
Rebecca is a housewife who is a mother of two children who lives in Japan. Her husband is working in the United States, she used to visit her husband with her children twice a year before the pandemic. Now with the prevalence of vaccines, she can bring her children to united with her husband again.
Key Research Insights & User Voices
Because we are living at such a unique moment, the majority of countries have imposed limits on public travel between countries in order to prevent COVID escalation. These policies are updated on a regular basis in response to local COVID cases. Travellers are often uncertain about what standards they must meet and what preparations they must make in order to visit the chosen country.
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The whole information-gathering process is very complicated, and it takes a lot of steps before getting the target information on COVID travelling regulations. The translation process will take much more time for travellers who only know one language.
​Here are some reviews which I found:
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Provide travellers with clear travel information, limits, and guidelines.
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Provide correct travel information based on the nationality and residence of the travellers.
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Assist people in getting around linguistic barriers when looking up trip information.
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These are the main obstacles for travellers when searching for information for travel planning during the Pandemic. Therefore, I identified my opportunity area as a virtual information hub to help collect and organize all necessary information to prepare travellers for entering different countries.
I created two user personas to give a representation of my target users. It aided me in gaining a clear understanding of user behaviours and demands, as well as defining whom I should deliver the solution to and what they require from a user-centred standpoint.
Design Process
User Flow
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We started with the onboarding screen to collect the user information including their nationality, residency, pr status, language and travel purpose.
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After collected all the information, the app will generate the home page that is relevant to the user with their info, countries and the countries latest travel regulation.
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The user can edit their profile, search country to check whether they can entered the country and access the link to the government official website for validation.
Low - Fidelity Prototype
This is the low-fidelity prototype created base on the user flow. We use button and bars to help the user navigate the app easily.
Usability Test
We conducted an unmoderated usability test with 5 target users by letting participants perform various tasks with the prototype while recording themselves about what the users are doing and how they are performing in the system.
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Find out your preferred country's travel regulations
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Find access to the official government website
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Edit your personal information
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Findings:
We found out the majority of the users can complete the tasks, however, some of them find the translator floating above the official government website page can be annoying. Thus, we moved the language section into the setting to simplify this function.
Features
Information hub
Integrates all COVID-related travel information and regulations in one mobile app. Provides the most up-to-date information according to each government's newest travel regulation.
Personalized Information
With the personal information that the user input at the sign-up section, the app will automatically generate lists of countries whether she/he can enter. In this way to provide users with a general idea of which countries they can
Liable Resource
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Translation
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Organize and provide the users with the key information to ease the stress to read chunky paragraphs and articles.
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Cross-reference with the official government travel regulation website to increase accuracy and credibility.
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The translation tool supports the users to understand travel restrictions even they don't understand the language that was provided.
Interactive Prototype
Concluding Statement
TravelGuard is a mobile app integrating all COVID-related travel information and regulations
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Visualize and reorganize information for easy access
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Assists users with different travel purposes and language backgrounds
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Future directions
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Incorporate other COVID-related information in different countries, such as the number of COVID cases in one month, area heat maps of COVID cases. This information was one of the tops highly required information.
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Calculate a safety index based on the stats above
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Provide a summarised travel suggestion for users
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Create a user community feature that allows users to engage with other users to get references and reviews for entering the different countries under this special circumstance.