WanderLust

Team

Danielle
Maddox

Filip
Tasadan

Isabelle
Tinsley

Roshan
Skariah

Sean
Ozinsky

Problem and Design Overview

Travelers often struggle to immerse themselves in local cultures, facing challenges in finding recommendations that cater to their preferences and those of their group. Current platforms focus on convenience but lack tools for meaningful cultural exploration.

Wanderlust aims to foster authentic cultural connections by enabling users to share and discover local recommendations while building meaningful relationships with locals and other fellow travelers. Many travelers desire more than generic itineraries; they seek unique experiences that balance spontaneity with group needs. This app bridges the gap, offering unique recommendations and opportunities for social connection.

See what your friends are up to

Look for social activities near you

Design Walkthrough

Our project is about improving cultural exchange by helping travelers and locals connect through shared experiences. To accomplish this, we focused on two main tasks: "Making New Friends While Traveling" and "Finding Locals’ Recommendations". We chose these as our tasks because they help people build meaninful connections while learning more about each other's cultures. By focusing on these tasks, we aim to make travel more personal and enjoyable for both tourists and locals. Additionally, these tasks encourage collaboration and trust by allowing users to share their own recommendations and join others' activities, creating a sense of community. "Finding Locals' Recommendations" encourages a further degree of collaboration through a reciprocal model of sharing a few of your own local gems to access an entire community of others.

Making new Friends While Traveling

To support our task of "Make New Friends While Traveling", we focused on designing a feature that let people easily find and join activities with others.

Browse join trips near you

Send automated join message

Travelers can browse trips near them, confirm their interest in joining an activity, and send automated messages to connect with the trip organizer. While participating in the activity, travelers have the opportunity to talk and bond over their shared interest.

Make social post after experience

Social post gets added to your profile

Afterwards, travelers can create social posts about their experience(s), which are added to their profile for others to see. When posting their own join trips in the future, other travelers and locals can use these past experiences to guage if they are interested in coming along.

If you had a great time during your activity, you can chat with people after your trip and continue to foster a bond by going on more join trips together or arranging your own plans through the chat function. Who knows, maybe you'll run into them again in some other country or they'll come visit your hometown.

Interacting with other people from around the world through shared activities encourages you to participate in cultural exchanges, broadening your perspective and exposing you to a global network of friends. It enriches your travel experience by creating memories that are not simply tied to the places you visit, but also the people you meet. Over time, this network of friends can serve as a source of inspiration, support, and future travel plans, making your journeys around the world feel more fufilling and interconnected.

Chat after shared activity

Finding Locals’ Recommendations

To support our task of "Finding Locals’ Recommendations", we designed a list and map view of interesting activities, events, and locations submitted by locals of the place you are visiting. We categorized these as local gems because they are reccomendations endorsed by locals that you won't find through a simple internet search.

List view of local gems

Map view of local gems

However, these reccomendations come at a cost. To facilitate the mutual exchange between locals and travelers, you are required to post two local gems from your hometown before gaining full access to the app. Once travelers have done this, they can freely access the list and map view of every local gem on the app. In the list view, travelers can browse local gems, including places like parks, restaurants, and breweries, with brief descriptions, pricing, and accessibility details. The map view gives travelers a visual representation of local gems that are near to their location.

Quick overview of local gem

More detailed info on local gem

Travelers can click on specific pins to view a quick overview, including ratings and reviews from locals. They can then access detailed information, such as directions and additional insights, like experiences shared by other travelers about the local gem.

These features emphasize the importance of building a collaborative and engaging community where travelers and locals both actively contribute and benefit. By sharing their own local reccomendations, travelers gain access to a broader network of suggestions, fostering a sense of mutual exchange and connection. This approach enriches our app with authentic unique experiences while also encouraging travelers to engage more deeply with their own communities. Being able to browse a list of high quality reccomendations at the push of a button empowers travelers to discover hidden treasures and culturally enriching activities. This design supports authentic exploration and promotes meaningful interactions between locals and travelers, enhancing the overall travel experience through genuine cultural exchange.

Design Research and Key Insights

In our design research, we aimed to understand how travelers discover unique cultural experiences and the barriers they face in finding such activities. We conducted semi-structured interviews and group discussions with participants, including university students, experienced solo travelers, and a group of friends who backpacked together. We chose these methods for their flexibility, allowing us to adapt questions to participants' experiences and gather rich qualitative insights. Having a diverse participant pool helped us explore varying perspectives on cultural immersion and travel planning. Our approach enabled us to identify common themes, such as the importance of social recommendations, the balance between planning and spontaneity, and the role of local insights, all of which informed the focus of our design solution.

Get Information On Activities From Locals

Ricky, a UW student, shared that the primary way she found out about fun and interesting cultural experiences was simply by talking to locals. A favorite memory she had was watching a Euro Cup game where she had been at a bar when the Netherlands won and she felt “ like a small part of the ecosystem”. Our application follows Ricky's insight into traveling by displaying a map of local activities that can be done nearby.

This provided insight into the importance of a dialog with locals and was important for our final design because it helped us categorize the types of activities that the application recommends to travelers. In our initial prototyping, our map included "touristy" reccomendations as well as local gems. However, our design research revealed that instead of focusing on all potential activities and tourist spots that can be found in a given location, we should emphasize a focus on activities recommended by local people. These reccomendations have the highest chance of providing meaningful cultural experiences to travelers, and if travelers are interested in finding "touristy" reccomendations, the internet has thousands of generic travel guides.

Map of hidden gems nearby

Sharing Cultural Experiences With Friends Is Essential

Participants said that they often prioritize immersing themselves in the local culture but also find significant value in sharing their cultural experiences with close friends. One participant highlighted that sharing these experiences deepens social bonds and offers a chance for personal reflection, leading to a greater appreciation of the knowledge and insights they’ve gained.

This feedback inspired us to enhance the social capabilities of our application. Travelers can create social posts after each activity, which are automatically added to their profiles for others to view. These posts also appear on their friends’ feeds, sparking conversations about past cultural activities and creating opportunities for deeper connections. This feature not only allows travelers to document their journeys but also encourages the exchange of cultural experiences within their network.

By integrating these social features, our application fosters a thriving community of interconnected travelers who inspire and encourage one another to explore the world and engage in cultural exchanges. These shared experiences create meaningful connections, broaden perspectives, and promote a sense of global unity, helping travelers build lasting relationships and a deeper appreciation for diverse cultures.

Make social post after the activity is done

Spontaneity and Flexibility Are Key Elements in Travel Planning

While participants generally prefer to plan major activities in advance, they highly value the ability to adapt and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. One participant described using tools like Google Maps to trop pins, allowing them to easily explore nearby activities on the spot. This helped them navigate efficiently while also providing the freedom to pivot if something was more intriguing or they were unable to complete their original plan.Participants emphasized prioritizing unique, unplanned experiences, which were often the most memorable moments of their trips.

Because of this emphasis on spontaneity and flexibility in our desing research, we designed the backbone of our application around this. These features allow travelers to discover and join nearby activities easily, enabling them to take advantage of impromptu opportunities. Travelers can also host their own activities, fostering connections with others who share similar interests. Additionally, our design includes tools for finding hidden local gems, allowing travelers to dive deeper into authentic, off-the-beaten-path experiences.

By integrating these features, our application not only supports the structured aspects of travel planning but also embraces the unexpected, making it easy for users to create meaningful and memorable experiences on the go. This combination of planned and spontaneous exploration enhances the overall travel experience, fostering a sense of adventure and discovery while maintaining the flexibility to adapt on the go based on your needs.

Browse for nearby activities and join them

Iterative Design and Key Insights

The iterative design process for Wanderlust involved multiple phases of refinement, beginning with paper prototyping, progressing through heuristic evaluations and usability testing, and creating our final design. Paper prototypes were used to sketch out workflows and interface layouts, focusing on the core tasks of "Finding Locals' Recommendations" and "Making New Friends While Traveling." These low-fidelity prototypes allowed us to explore ideas quickly and make adjustments based on initial evaluations.

Heuristic evaluations identified usability issues such as missing back buttons, unclear navigation flows, and redundant elements. These issues helped us make revisions to ensure the design aligned with user expectations and provided intuitive interaction paths. We conducted usability testing, highlighting challenges in navigation, task visibility, and users’ mental models of the app's features. We tested with diverse participants which helped emphasized the need for structural revisions, such as reorganizing menus and simplifying user flows. The transition to digital mockups offered a more realistic testing environment, which helped iterate on the interface and functionality based on feedback.

Intuitive Navigation Matters

Paper prototype screens without back buttons for emergency exits

Throughout our testing, users frequently encountered difficulties navigating between pages due to the absence of back buttons and a lack of clear pathways to exit or return to previous states. These challenges were flagged during usability testing and heuristic evaluations, emphasizing violations of the "User Control and Freedom" heuristic.

Exit button

Conformation and cancel buttons

Back button

To address this issue, we implemented structured navigation elements, including back buttons and cancel options, ensuring users could move seamlessly between sections without confusion. This improvement created a more intuitive experience, empowering users to explore the app effortlessly while enhancing their overall satisfaction with the interface.

Locals’ Engagement Is Key

No incentive for locals to share their reccomendations

After our initial testing, it was clear that locals were hesitant to contribute their recommendations, often feeling that the effort lacked immediate personal benefit.

Features locked until travelers submit two of their own local gems

To address this barrier, we introduced a reciprocal model requiring users to share their own recommendations before accessing the full database. Limited previews of other users’ contributions were also added to showcase the app’s value and encourage participation. These changes helped establish a sense of mutual exchange, fostering a stronger community of engaged users willing to share their unique cultural insights.

Task Clarity Improves Usability

Feed and connections with mixed functionality

Participants struggled to locate features such as joining activities or posting recommendations, which limited their ability to fully engage with the app’s capabilities. Usability testing highlighted the need for clearer feature discoverability and a more intuitive mental model for navigating throughout the app.

Functionality separated into each individual tab

To address this, we redesigned menus and included contextual prompts to guide users. For example, join buttons were made to be more prominent on activity feeds, and key functions were highlighted to reduce user confusion. These adjustments ensure that users can easily access and utilize the app's most important features.