Presenting Sweet, a platform that connects a trusted community of female travelers all around the world.
Project Brief
I was an engineering student at UC Berkeley, and part of a team of students who had the objective to launch a product in the context of a Product Management class. Most of the team members had relevant travel-related experiences, and we decided to design a new experience for solo female travelers.
The team
6 students at UC Berkeley (2 marketers, 1 business analysts, 1 UX researcher, 1 UX/UI designer)
My role
UX/UI designer
Location and timeline
UC Berkeley, CA, United States
January 2018 — April 2018
Skills and tools used
UX/UI, Market research, User Research, Landscape analysis, Value prop canvas
Sketch, Invision, Marvelapp
Problem
Loneliness and safety are the biggest roadblocks to female travelers
Traveling solo has become more and more popular. The USA is considered as the biggest market for solo female travelers, with approximately 6.5 million solo female travelers a year (source).
- Safety and fear of loneliness are the #1 reason for women not to travel alone.
- Solo traveler’s greatest concern is encountering a dangerous situation without a travel companion
Goal
Build a worldwide and trustworthy community of female travelers
We believed that traveling is one of the most enjoyable experiences in life. By focusing on a specific target audience, the female travel enthusiasts, we wanted to enrich their traveling experience in the following way:
- Reduce stress, fear of loneliness, and harassment when traveling alone
- Connect female travelers from all around the world
Solution
A technology platform that connects female travelers in a safer and simpler way.
Sweet is a mobile app where female travelers can meetups with other when traveling abroad.
- Build a female-only community of travelers
- Help travelers meet trustworthy mates along the way
- Help travelers organize, share and join activities nearby
Process
Cycle 1
Research
2 weeks
Market research
Landscape analysis
Differentiating strategy
Personas
User Research
Cycle 2
Proof of concept
2 weeks
Social experiment
Value proposition canvas
Cycle 3
Product
9 weeks
Ideation and sketches
Feature prioritization
Hi-fi prototype
Ideate, test, learn
Market research
Learnings
- Research showed that only about 20% of solo female travelers are between ages 18 and 35.
- The USA is considered as the biggest market for solo female travelers, with approximately 6.5 million solo female travelers a year
- Fear of safety issues is the main reason for women not to travel alone.
Personas
Meet Erin
Erin is an adventurous traveler. She likes traveling by herself sometimes. She enjoys meeting new people along the way, and heavily relies on the Couchsurfing network to find like-minded people when traveling alone.
Competitive analysis
We gathered information about the competition to forecast the potential in the market. Several direct and analogous competitors were analyzed. Among our closest competitors, we identified hostels, and as our closest analogs, Tinder and Couchsurfing, as they were also serving a very similar target audience.
Analysis methods:
- Competitor Profile
- SWOT Analysis
Learnings
The analysis showed there was currently no traveling app connecting female travelers within a safe community. Existing platforms still raised safety concerns regarding unverified users, unsolicited messages, and lack of profile privacy. Moreover, platforms fail at providing a feeling of belonging to a trusted community. This lack of clear focus on safety and the female traveling community presented a unique opportunity.
Main hypothesis
Very soon in the process, we stated clearly the first principle hypothesis our product strategy was relying on, so that we could refer to it throughout the design process, to validate or challenge them.
1. Key differentiators
- “Female only”
- “Travel Focused”
- “Trusted Community”
2. Users' wants
- Female travelers feel safer meeting up with strangers when the strangers are female.
- Female travelers want to meet up with other female travelers.
- Solo female travelers want to share experience with other travelers.
The next step of the project consisted of testing our hypothesis against real potential users, through a user research phase and a social experiment to prove the concept.
User research
Interviewees are young females between the ages of 18-25, Berkeley students. Travel enthusiasts, frequent travelers, some are international students or moved to the United States from other countries.
Empathizing with fellow students
In total, we had interviewed more than 12 female students on campus. For each participant of the simulation, we would design a profile card to share with the whole team in order to empathize with each of the participants of the user pool.
Eliminating bias
In the process of preparing the script, one of the hardest best practices to follow was to write questions in a way that eliminates confirmation bias. For example, one of our hypotheses was that female travelers feel safer meeting up with a stranger if that person is also a female, but we did not want to ask the question that suggests gender is a factor. We ended up splitting the question into multiple ones.
Objective
Have people experiencing a traveling experience on campus
Before even building the product, we decided to run a social experiment on campus to test our hypothesis against real conditions. This experiment simulated the experience of travelers meeting up and sharing an experience together.
Finding, Qualifying, and Participating
We implemented a simulation of pairing up people who did not know each other before. We designed a survey form which allows the potential participants to upload a profile picture, write their interests and activities they would like to do, as well as a short introduction of themselves. Members of our team sent the survey to their female friends who were potentially interested in participating in the simulation. After getting the responses the team manually paired up the participants based on mutual interests and availability.
Results and findings
Interest was confirmed
The enthusiastic participation of students in this experiment confirmed the interest of people to meet up with strangers fellow female travelers and to share their experience.
The “female-only“ positioning is not unanimous
Some participants mentioned feeling more comfortable with people of the same gender or in the same age group, while other claimed the opposite was true as well.
Mutual friendship solves trust
Most of the interviewees mentioned that meeting a person after a “mutual friend vetting” relieved a lot of fear, discomfort, and uncertainty.
Offline UX matters
This experiment helped us deeper understand the offline experience of our product, which corresponds to the moment when people have face-to-face social interaction. The journey we designed before the meet up didn't encourage dialogue between users. More dialogue beforehand could lead to more comfort, thus decreasing the nervousness our users were feeling during the simulations.
Value proposition canvas
The user research and the social experiment were used to create the value proposition canvas. It maintained a clear focus on what the most important to our users and aligned the team on a clear objective.
Product goals
The interviews and the quick persona-building gave us some clarity on user needs that we translated to product goals:
Trust & safety — Making sure travelers were feeling safe talking and meeting with other females on the platform.
Speed/Accessibility — Getting to meet up with other travelers as quickly as possible.
Engagement — Enabling travelers to organize or join out-door activities seamlessly.
Community — Providing a sense of belonging to a trusted, reliable and supportive community.
NPS Maximization — Affording a non-intimidating and friendly experience.
Explore people and activities
The main experience of the traveling app has been built around the exploration feature. This approach solves the problem of finding other travelers to connect with in two ways. One way is to look for interesting travelers around, while the other way focuses on joining a group activity and sharing experience with other travelers.
Design for trust
Because our values were based on trust, we decided that each member’s identity needed to be approved by our team in order to make sure that only females enter the community. We designed a membership application process to filter in only good members into the community.
Pros
- Increases safety and trust within the community
- Filters in the most motivated users
- Filters out non-females from the community
Cons
- High upfront investment cost for users
- The 1-day approval process is a huge opportunity for users to drop off
- Users don't feel comfortable sending their ID if the platform doesn't have credentials
- Is not guaranteed to work 100%
A risky user flow
Even though security and safety were among our core value proposition, setting up such a long funnel would definitely hurt customer acquisition and growth, because it represents a big opportunity for users to drop-off. Such a user flow is a very risky bet.
Design for social connections
One of our biggest objective was to make travelers feel comfortable meeting someone they don't know. According to our prior user research, we found out 4 key drivers that help travelers connect with others in a foreign environment:
- Sharing activity interest is one of the most prominent way to meet with new other people when traveling.
- Nationality is a key driver to social connection.
- Picturing the person's face is before meeting a stranger is genuinely important.
- Age is probably the factor that comes last, even though it is considered as important.
Before
The first design was bringing both people and activities on the same page. This led to confusion as people didn't really understand if the main intention was to browse for people or to browse for activities.
After
In the last version, we split up the browse experience into two different tabs. As a consequence, we had more space to dedicate to people's profiles, so we made generous cards to make discovery experience feel like watching a series of printed pictures.
The challenge with user profiles was to define the right information to display in order to inspire trust, without exposing user's privacy to the community.
Design for safety
Our main goal was to help female travelers connect with like-minded people in a safe way. At first, we took for granted that trust would no longer be an issue after the membership approval process was passed. We decided to design a search experience to find travelers nearby.
Version A
After some feedback, we realized travelers were still not feeling like sharing their real-time location with strangers; no matter how reliable the platform was.
Version B (winner)
To ensure safety and privacy, we implemented a map that would only display the closest people around without informing about their precise location. This variation was better appreciated by interviewees.
Design for human experiences
The core part of the project was to make travelers organize and join out-door activities with other travelers from the community.
Creating an activity
The community lives around shared activities between travelers. A painful funnel would prevent most users from creating their own activities. As a consequence, when designing the user flow, we identified the most demanding steps in term of cognitive load, and came up with simple UX tricks to reduce friction.
- Provide help and guidance at the right time to reduce friction
- Provide clear micro copy to reduce risks of misinterpretation
- Allow user to review and edit information before completing the last step
Design Gallery
Reflection
Sweet was my very first project as a so called UX/UI designer from start to finish. This opportunity offered me a deep exposition to product design. I always had been interested in design, but never actually created anything new from scratch. I realized that I could spend countless hours solving problems with design. This experience remains one of my favorite ones during my time at UC Berkeley.
Learned new processes for building products
Thanks to this experience, I considerably ramped up my skills in UX/UI design. I learned to use new tools, such as Sketch and build prototypes using Marvel and Invision.
Empathizing with a different audience
This deeper user research led me to empathize with the experiences of people that are different than me. Designing for female travelers as a male designer requires uncovering in-depth knowledge about their feelings and expectations.
Collaboration is key
Working with brilliant students who had complementary skills was key to the success on this project. We reviewed our project twice a week, and often challenged the product in a constructive way.
Acknowledgment
I very much appreciated working on this project. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to be part of this team and work with brilliant students with a passion for traveling. I consider it as a chance to work on something that could be incredibly impactful — a project that empowered the female community and promoted open-mindedness.
I would like to dedicate a special “thank you” note to Hadar, who I sincerely believe is the best UX researcher I have ever met. Her passion for understanding people's problems at core level truly inspired my way of empathizing and building products.
Thank you for reading!