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Desmond Garrido

Desmond GarridoDesmond GarridoDesmond Garrido

Spek

Project Overview

 

Spek is an online community for and by the business traveler: honest peer-to-peer reviews, helpful tips while on the road, travel-related news, opportunities for new connections, and discounted shopping. I had the wonderful opportunity to undertake an internship with Spek!

 

 

 

Duration: 20 weeks



Tools: Figma, Ionic, Trello, Google Suite, GitHub 


 


Sponsors: Ted Cullen & Mike Ivey  



Programming Languages: Typescript, HTML, CSS  

Pitch

Problem

How do we foster a community of business travelers?

Our sponsors wanted my team and I to create social media and community driven aspects to bolster the app's user activity and user retention





Solution

Designing a system that consists of community features that allow users to interact, communicate, and connect with other business travelers on the Spek application. 

Concept Screens

    The beginning

    To understand the project in its entirety...

    When we first met with our sponsors, they came to us with a mobile application that had basic functionalities for searching, viewing, and reviewing a hotel in addition to a user profile page. However, they needed help in designing a system that would also incorporated a user feed, more enhancements and personalization to the user profile, and ways for users to connect and communicate with each other. 









    USER RESEARCH

    Persona

    What's something exciting your business offers? Say it here. Based on the different articles and resources provided by our sponsors concerning business travel, we went identified the key goals, needs, and frustrations of our users. With this design artifact at hand, we were able to keep the user in mind when designing different solutions. [Click the image for full view]

    User Journey

     

    We created a User Journey map in order to identify major touchpoints for when and how a user will be using the Spek application. We identified that the most common times a user would be using the Spek app would be: 

    • Prior to going on a business trip
    • During their business trip (including when they check-in to a hotel)
    • After their business trip. 

    Based on this user journey map, we suggested 3 features to implement that would enhance the user experience of Spek. [Click the image for full view]

    Wireframes

      Based on our research and weekly meetings with our sponsors, we decided to focus on designing 3 new features that would be integrated within the Spek application to provide more of a community aspect:   


      • User feed  
      • User profile enhancements such as badges   
      • Eco-footprint dashboard and calculator. 

       When creating these designs, we wanted to keep the wireframes as barebones as possible in order to understand the skeleton our designs would be built on top of. We started with creating the base features of what we wanted the app to have, which included the three tabs at the top as well as our navigation bar on the bottom.   

      Mockups and Prototypes

      Eco Footprint

      •  Eco footprint tutorial screens
        • Introduce users to Eco Footprint features and surveys
      • Eco Footprint score and breakdown
        • Average score is calculated based on responses to questionnaire with a breakdown of each category's significance to a user's score.
      • Initial iteration of questionnaire surveys
        • Different categories with corresponding questions to track user's Eco activity: Travel, Shopping, Sustainability
      • History of previous Eco Footprint questionnaires
        • Users can view their previously submitted questionnaires and view their correponding Eco score based on their responses.
      • Save questionnaire drafts and complete it later
        • Allows users to save their progress and complete surveys later

      User Feed

       

      • Post to feed
        • Upload photos, reviews, articles, hotel check-ins and badge achievements
      • Save and edit post as draft
        • Users can save their posts as drafts to edit and upload on another occasion
      • View articles in addition to connections' posts and activity
        • The home feed consists of a variety of different posts from a user's connection with the ability to filter by categories: reviews, social,  and articles. 
        • Articles can be shared and viewed all without navigating away from the app
      • Like, share, and comment on your favorite posts
        • All posts are able to interacted with as well as be reported/flagged if any community guidelines are violated
      • Search the feed
        • Users can search for connections, relevant articles, and other information that may be useful for their next business trip.
      • View a connection's reviews on their hotel stays

      User Profile

       

      • History of user's posts
        • Users can see the different types of posts that they've previously uploaded as well as their Eco Footprint score 
      • Edit Profile Information for better connections
      • View list of connections and any incoming requests to connect with other users
      • View previously liked posts
        • Access to previously liked posts
      • View history of reviews from previous hotel stays
      • Communicate with others through direct messaging
      • Achieve new badges to display and share with others

      Implementation

       

      • The initial plan was to integrate code into the existing codebase, but we were unable to run it due to the lack of documentation
      • After talking with our sponsors and our professor, we figured that it would be better to not try and code out the whole application, but rather, focus on one aspect and implementing that.
        • We did this because we realized there might not be enough time to properly code, develop, and test each respective segment. So instead we just focused on one.
      • We chose to actually implement the Eco Footprint part of the application because we felt that it was one of the most complex features, and hardest to show statically through Figma.

      Site Content

      Figma

      Github

      Github

      Click the image to view my designs in Figma!

      Github

      Github

      Github



      Click this image to view the repository containing the code I produced for this project.

      What I Learned

       

      • Working with different stakeholders to understand software requirements 
      • Understanding the target market and potential competitors
      • Agile Methodology
      • Project and Time Management
      • Defining and adjusting Project Scope

      Copyright © 2020 Desmond Garrido - All Rights Reserved.

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