Mingle
Help travelers to build connections during the trip
A mobile app for travelers who want to find travel buddies with similar interests going to the same destinations.
Responsibilities
User Research, UX, UI
Time
12 Months
Anyi Dai, Songlin Wu, Chuqi Zeng, Xiaohai Sun, Xin He
Team
Overview
Nearby Meetups
The home page shows the nearby map and popular attractions. Users can browse and join meetups they like.
Personalized Matching
Find the most suitable meetup using the filter.
Create a Meetup
Browse through different kinds of local guided tours here.
Informative Profile
Know about the travel buddies. Where did they go? What did other travel buddies talk about them?
Chat Group
Chat with like-minded buddies aiming to the same destination.
THE PROBLEM
Travelers want to meet new people on the road
Travelers feel alone and unsafe when they don't have someone traveling with them
Travelers want to share joy with others
Research
Competitor Analysis
Interview & Survey
Journey Map
OUR SOLUTION
For travelers who want like-minded companions and authentic and unique experiences, Mingle is a mobile app that connects travelers with similar interests, helps them find local tour guides, and provides customized guide services, unlike looking for companions on online forums or buying conventional inflexible tours.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Based on the data we collected from travel industry reports by business, research and government entities, there is an $84M opportunity in the US travel community social media market. We continued the research by studying our direct and indirect competitors to get a idea of what had been done in the market to solve the problem we were looking into. We found that none of our competitors are doing personalized matches based on the travelers’ requirements for travel partners and other travelers’ basic information. There could be an opportunity in this aspect.
INTERVIEW & SURVEY
Using snowball sampling, we conducted 109 interviews online in 3 months with travelers aged from the 20s to the 70s. The following are the insights we got from interview data.
To further understand what types of travelers prefer to find travel partners and what destinations they like the most, we sent a survey online to potential users and got 209 responses. Among them, 56 participants said they had ever tried to find travel partners, most of whom aged 18-34, defining themselves as nature traveler, food lover, and discoverer.
PERSONA
We focused on two types of users based on their different approaches to socializing.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
Based on the data we got from the interviews and surveys, a typical user and their customer journey map are created as above.
TASK ANALYSIS
We break down the general tasks into small steps and touchpoints with proposed pages. The following user flow shows how a first-time user explores and joins a meetup to mingle with like-minded travel partners.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
Then, we started to craft designs to fulfill the users' needs for compatibility, safety, and fewer communication efforts.
Design
SKETCH
The following sketch shows our early idea of the home page. Users can click nearby place pins to see related travelers and meetups.
LO-FI INTERFACES
When making early-stage wireframes, I applied the insights got from user research into design. Such as automatically showing users the meetups that match their profile, interest, and habits, allowing users to browse nearby places to find people heading to the same place, let users review each other to boost an authentic community culture.
HI-FI INTERFACES
Explore Nearby
With a map view on the home page, users can easily explore through nearby place pins to find like-minded travelers.
Match by Interests
We want to make sure users find traveler partners with similar interests and expectations of their upcoming meetups.
Trusted Ratings & Reviews
Ratings & reviews reveal the user's personality through travel buddies' perspectives, boosting information credibility.
User Test
What the potential users think about our prototype is insightful.
After creating the first version of hi-fi interfaces, we conducted 6 user tests to find out the users' feelings and opinions of our current design. 3 user stories are tested in this process.
User Story 1
A user traveling in NYC would like to visit the MET. They explored meetups created by other users and found one suitable for their schedule. They joined that meetup and communicated with other meetup members in a chat group.
User Story 2
A user traveling in NYC would like to visit the MET. They explored meetups created by other users and could not find one suitable for their schedule. They wrote their meetup post and recruited three travel buddies to the same destination.
User Story 3
After hanging out with travel buddies from Mingle app, a user received a prompt on Mingle app to review these travel buddies. They rated these partners and wrote comments for them.
Insights from Tests
Usability testing revealed that the 5-star rating we chose in travel buddy review feature is overwhelming and is not compatible with the tone as a traveler social media app which is too rigid and professional.
We also learned that some of our visual details, like the “More Meetups Button” are not intuitive enough for users to find, understand and use.
Iterations after Tests
We changed the 5-star rating selector into a thumb up/down one to make it compatible in the casual and cheerful social context.
We changed the visual and interaction design of “More Meetups Button”, and add “See All” link to make them intuitive to find, understand and use.
Lessons
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Think big and broaden the vision first, then trim and polish the details, both in business and design.
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Need to find the balance among user experience and constraints like business goals and available resources.
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Usability testing is a crucial method to get feedbacks from target users before we invest too much resources like money and time into software implementation.
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Make the icon & text labels intuitive to read and understand
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Different designs conveys different emotions. As a social app, we need to create a friendly, welcoming, relaxing, and cheerful atmosphere.