Cal Poly's UX Fest - Project: Canari

Canari is a travel app prompted by California Polytechnic State University’s UX Fest – “A Post Covid World”. Teams were asked to create a tool to help navigate the new normal and my team created a solution to help users travel to familiar destinations with piece of mind.

This is a group project I got to work on with members from all over the country. I led a team of five students and we had only five days to prepare an idea and bring it to fruition before presentation day where participants were judged by UX and UI professionals from Adobe, Lyft, Microsoft and DocuSign. Project Canari made it to the finalist round.

My Role

Research & Strategy
Wireframing
Branding

Tools

Figma
Illustrator
Photoshop

Post COVID-19 Travel

To develop a better understanding of the user's COVID travel “needs” and “wants”, we created a survey asking participants a total of eleven COVID traveling related questions. The question included fill-in’s, multiple selections, ratings, and multiple choice. We received a total of 29 responses. Using our participants’ responses and feedback, we developed our app, Canari.

Goals and Impact

The user goal is to easily locate high foot traffic areas and navigate through or around them. With the ability to leave reviews on business’ Covid protocols, other users would be able to plan their trip with peace of mind.

If the goals have been met, we can expect to see users traveling more often while supporting ethically responsible business’.

Challenges

When we recall the data from the interviews, we broke down the concerns with travel into two objectives:

Navigating Hot Spots

How can we provide the user the control to avoid areas with potentially high exposure rates?

Noting on Protocols

How can the user notify other users of a business’ Covid protocols, or the lack there-of.

Research

Understanding Target Users

Learning the needs of our users helped us shape a solution that will ease any concerns in planning future trips.

Surveying Data

We conducted interviews to build on the travel needs in a post-COVID world. Card sorting strengthened our ability to organize the tools our users would utilize in Canari.

Design Concept

We researched color palettes that invites a calming experience and applied color theory when incorporating colors for hover links and accent elements. The design layouts resemble patterns familiar to the user to make navigation and interactions easy.

Providing Hot Spots on current map areas

This feature allows the user to clearly see what areas are heavy with foot traffic. This is beneficial to users who are high risk for COVID-19, this gives them the power to travel whenever and where ever they feel most safe.

Leaving Reviews on COVID-19 Protocols

The ability to leave a note on how well protocols were met will provide much need information to the next visitor that wishes to avoid venues or business that don’t encourage things such as mask mandates.

Live updates for Hot Spots

When the user leaves a review, they can simply share how crowed the area was during a select time frame. This information is then added to the live hot spot map.

UX Fest SLO Finalist

We successfully completed Canari from the beginning stages of user research to the final prototype in five days. This project provided us with a new perspective on how we'll move through the new normal. Even though this was a short term project, we collectively out performed ourselves and we look forward to joining future teams that design with the user in mind first.

Please view our prototype here.