MVP and product pitch for Bruin Labs' 8 week project sprint. My team and I created a social travel web application based off our findings from our user research.
Role : Designer
Team : 5 other teammates with roles in project management, business analysis, and development
Skills :
Duration : 8 weeks ; June 2021 - August 2021
BruinLabs is a product and business plan development summer program wherein participants will design their own project and work on a business plan with their teams, while also engaging in a series of specialized workshops and panels on product development.
Each group consisted of 3-5 college students supported by a Project Manager who will help the participants and act as the team’s guide throughout the 8-week entrepreneurial process.
Ideate and build a prototype for a product based on a market need to present to entrepreneurs on demo day for feedback and prizes.
To start the sprint, as a team we gathered we wanted to work on a project that involved travel and social connection because we were inspired by travel opening up in the summer of 2021. We had lots of ideas for features, but wanted to make sure our product would stay user centered
We conducted user interviews with friends asking details about their last vacation in order to gain insight on what users value when trip planning and how they connect to others through sharing travels on social media. Concurrently we also released marketing surveys to get demographic information and current methods for travel planning, which would then help inform our competitive analysis.
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Using suggestions from both the marketing survey and user interviews, I created an Airtable spreadsheet organizing the strengths and weaknesses of potential competitor apps. The analysis helped to see the different user base each app served, with some being more focused on social media, travel booking, destination reviews, or transit routing.
Combining our research from interviews, surveys, and competitive analysis allowed us to narrow down what we wanted to focus on for our app.
From our interviews and surveys we decided that the target audience we were trying to reach were the young adult population. Pain points this population encounters include limited time and money, and an uncertainty how to coordinate travel logistics.
Using this demographic information, we came up with 2 personas to serve as our target audience to design our app for.
After all our user research we synthesized our findings by affinity mapping data points from our interview sessions, surveys, and competitive analysis.
Using Lucidchart we grouped together the common themes from our affinity map, and together ideated how we could translate these ideas into features.
As a team we established our common themes across our research and came up with our final features, combining perspectives from technical feasibility to business needs.
Users on Discoveri would be able to....
In this project I got to work more on branding design than I have in previous projects. My PM Miles and I did some branding exercises together to establish what kind of tone we would want for the app. After thinking of a few different options we constructed moodboards for design inspiration.
From these moodboards I began designing branding presentations with variations for logos, color schemes, and fonts.
Combining feedback from critique sessions with my team, we finalized down to one logo and app name
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My favorite part of the project was the prototyping, where I was able to leverage my creativity using Figma's smart animate transition to create high fidelity interactions.
I really like that I got the freeform map scrolling to animate smoothly along with the post scrolling.
It was a great 8 weeks and I especially appreciate all the exposure I got to crossfunctional teamwork. I think this is the project I worked the most on market research, and I like that each step in the process transitioned and informed the next stage.
After this project I think in the future I'd like to work more on branding and visual design as well as continuing research skills.
