Enhance Travel Experience

Streamlining Visa Information and Embassy Communication for Millennials and Gen-Z.

Project Detail

HCID 500 Theories of Human Interaction

Human-Centered Discovery Phase

HU HCID Summer 2024

Deliverables

  • Survey

  • Secondary Research Report

  • Defined Problem Statement

  • Personas

  • User Journey Mapping

This project focuses on the discovery phase of the Double Diamond process to explore how Millennials and Gen-Z travelers navigate fulfilling visa requirements and embassy communication.

  • Travelers rely on fragmented, often conflicting sources for visa information, such as from friends, family members, social forums, and government websites.

  • When travelers are confused during the process of preparing for a visa application, this leads to delays, denied applications, or reliance on third parties such as travel agents, which costs money.

  • When travelers fail to find required information, such as visa requirements, it usually means they discovered it too late in the travel planning process.

Design Direction for Solution

  • We designed a centralized platform that gives travelers clear, up-to-date tourist visa info based on their passport and destination.

  • By partnering with government sites and flight booking platforms, we aim to surface visa alerts earlier, before users even finish booking their trips.

  • This reduces confusion, saves time, and helps people avoid relying on expensive third-party agencies.

Visual Highlights

User Journey Map

Empathy Mapping

Primary Persona

Reflection

This was our first HCID team project, and it taught us how to navigate messy systems and focus on what travelers truly experience and need. We worked closely together across research and analysis, and I learned a lot about turning scattered insights into one clear design direction. If we had more time, I would’ve explored a website audit or heuristic evaluation of popular visa sites and looked deeper into how early access to visa alerts could shape the travel planning experience.

Team

Quynh Nguyen

Ju Eun Lim

Yangyang Liang

Zhi Zheng

  • Empathy Mapping

  • Edge Cases Identification

  • Design Recommendations

  • Discovery Process Report

  • Final Presentation Pitch.

Time

May - Aug 2024

Overview

Key Insights

Approach

Our team conducted a survey with a focus in understanding what disrupts the process of travel planning and visa application planning. We also conducted secondary research by complying articles, academic papers, and checking government websites.

Besides primary and secondary research, we used user-centered exercises such as empathy mapping, user journey mapping, and persona creations to understand our users’ perspective, behavior, pain points, and motivations.