Caravan California

The Challenge

Caravan is a group travel app that enhances the experience of traveling in groups by enabling music sharing and location tracking of all parties en-route to any event or destination. Our team wanted to develop an app from scratch, taking it from ideation to production.

My Role

I was approached by a colleague of mine to lead the design efforts in terms of the UX and UI as well as branding of the project. I assisted in gathering user research and product vision and business strategy for the project since the outset of the project in 2015.

Ideation and Project Planning

Our team at Caravan consisted of 2 designers and 2 developers. We gathered together to discuss features of the app, gain requirements, allocate tasks and timelines for the project. Since there was no one designated project manager on the team, we each took it upon ourselves to communicate extensively with each other hold each other accountable for sprint deadlines.

Design Execution & Validation

The research phase of this project involved a great deal of competitive analysis, market research and surveys. I was designing from scratch but worked iteratively with the designers and engineers to come up with a minimum viable product (MVP). I developed user personas to give us a visual representation of some of the different users that would be using the app. I then tailored all further iterations to satisfy that of the team and met the results of our research. 

Brand Identity

Before we jumped into any high fidelity mockups, I was tasked with coming up with a logo and overall brand identity for Caravan. This was a lot more difficult that anticipated and required many iterations to get consensus from the full team. Most of the graphic design work I had done on Adobe Illustrator. 

Wireframing

Once the branding was completed, I began by listing out some of the key features of the app and really going in depth with these features. I also sketched out some very rough wireframes on a whiteboard before taking them into sketch where I designed the low-fidelity wireframes. The wireframes gave us a good structure and outline as to how we would incorporate certain features of the app and what were ways that would make the app as intuitive and simple as possible.

Mockups

For each feature phase, I went through cycles of requirements, consensus, approvals, detailed spec and handoffs.

Once I had the right wireframes to get me started, I took them into sketch and layed things out where they were most suited based on consensus with my tea. Since we were designing this from scratch, it took a great deal of trial and error to get the mockups done. .

My next step involved taking the screens/artboards and piecing them together with InVision and Proto.io. The prototype allowed me to display the screen transitioning for ease of use for gaining feedback. 

Challenges

Some of the main challenges for this project was getting managing the full amount of work without a project manager which in hindsight, would have made the overall process much smoother and seamless instead of having to each wear many different hats for the project. 

Managing feedback was also challenging because it felt like there was a tug-of-war in terms of varying viewpoints amongst the team on certain features and design decisions. I took everyone on the team's opinions and suggestions into consideration before deciding to implement a certain feature, ultimately using the data and research to validate which decision we ultimately went with, making sure to explain why we did what we did to the team