TA Mobile — Won Sun Parque

TripAdvisor Mobile App

Travelers launch TripAdvisor Mobile app to find places for food, things to do, and places to stay. Making it easy for them to do this became one of our main design goals.

Downloadable Cities, so that travelers can find places even when there is no internet connections. Search by Neighborhoods connects travelers to places within an area of unique characters. Travel Guides help them find places in a given context and time frame. Map Browsing and Nearby Search make it easy to find places based on spatial relationships. Review Translation allows travelers to take into consideration the opinions of those who do not speak their languages. Opening Hours helps them focus on the establishments that will be operating when they arrive.

User research

We conduct a lot of interviews with travelers worldwide to understand their travel app use patterns. For example, many people find their travel inspirations from magazines, TV programs, movies, etc. Many remember what a place looks like, but not what it is called, especially when it is in a language that they do not speak. This makes it necessary for our apps to offer large enough photo thumbnails on the map and on the search result list screen to connect these places to travelers’ visual memories.

We adopted Stanford d. school design thinking methodology in 2015. Its rapid ideation, prototyping, and testing helped us find solutions to complex problems travelers face today.

Wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes

Interaction flows, information architectures, animation, layout, and the use of shapes, colors, and forms, etc, communicate different things to the users. Solutions often take shape when we move fluently back and forth among wireframes, mockups and interactive prototypes. It was common, for example, for us to visualize a few key screens at higher fidelity when we were working on wireframes. For higher-stake projects, we also scheduled prototype testing in between design sprints. These testings could be done in the lab, or outside in the field. The results were fed back into the process for us to continue refining the design.

We used Sketch primarily for designing; Flinto and InVision for interactive prototyping.

Development and visual qa

I was actively involved in the entire development process and offered support for design clarifications, last-minute design adjustment, and visual QA before signing off. We did a lot of A/B testing projects, so even after the initial project launch, there were a number of design adjustments and follow-up tests when needed.

The main tool that we used for collaboration between designers and developers was Zeplin.