Adding a Feature · Travel · Augmented Reality
Atlas Obscura is an existing digital platform and online community that celebrates and explores the world's hidden, unusual, and offbeat wonders. What makes Atlas Obscura special is that it welcomes contribution from a vibrant and engaged community of users who can share their own discoveries and experiences. Its mission is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the world by uncovering and sharing the stories of obscure and remarkable places.
Planning and saving an itinerary
Existing map view
Existing POI card
Existing filter screen
THE CHALLENGE
Considering the diverse array of explorer personas, my objective was to create a feature with universal appeal. I began the process by outlining a dozen distinct explorer archetypes based on information from letsroam.com and delving into the common denominators that bind them. Alternatively stated, I assessed the fundamental tasks that all explorers invariably undertake. In broad terms, budgeting, communication with others, essential documentation, navigation, planning, and safety precautions emerged as essential undertakings.
Once I compiled this list, I evaluated improving which undertakings would best support the product's overarching theme of discovery. Atlas Obscura presents nearby points of interest to its users, after which the platform's functionalities are quite limited.
According to a 2019 survey by Google Consumer Insights, around 69% of travelers start their trip planning with a general idea of the destination but no fixed plans. A notable opportunity emerged, centered around optimizing the planning and navigation aspects of sequencing multiple points of interests together. The idea of an itinerary planner was born.
I led the development of the additional feature for Atlas Obscura from May to June in 2023. Throughout this period, I collaborated closely with Praveen Naga and engaged with six enthusiastic participants who share a passion for exploration and discovery. My collaboration extended to a product manager, educator, program manager, writer, interior designer and recruiter.
KICKOFF
Obtaining insights into explorers' planning and navigation habits was a pivotal step in the research process. Prior to conducting 1-on-1 interviews, I initiated a poll to gain a clearer understanding of people's mode of travel preferences.
The poll results clearly indicated that a significant majority of individuals prefer walking as their preferred mode of travel when exploring. This discovery informed my latter study of innovative methods, such as augmented reality (AR), to enhance the pedestrian navigation experience.
I conducted interviews with five participants to uncover the various obstacles people encounter when planning and navigating between different points of interest. To synthesize these findings, I employed affinity mapping to visually chart recurring patterns. Subsequently, I crafted two user personas to encapsulate the collective characteristics of the individuals who participated in these interviews.
During my interview process, I identified two distinct traveler profiles: individuals who meticulously research and plan every aspect of their trips and those who embrace spontaneity.
Amanda values simplicity and ease in trip planning, preferring a relaxed and easygoing approach, unwinding during vacations without overthinking intricate details.
Andrew combines his love for frequent travel with his analytical skills from his finance background, making informed decisions to maximize his travel experiences and returns.
THE DISCOVERY
Interviews and crafting the two personas unveiled an intriguing way to categorize people's planning behaviors. According to social psychologists, "maximizers" and "satisficers" are two distinct types of people when it comes to decision-making and life choices. These types explain how individuals approach the concept of maximizing satisfaction in various aspects of their lives, including travel and exploration.
Research emphasized the significance of designing a tool capable of assisting a wide range of travelers and their unique preferences. With an understanding of maximizers and satisficers representing two contrasting ends of the spectrum, my aim was to design the itinerary planning product in a way that not only caters to both types of explorers but also encourages them to explore outside their usual behavioral patterns. By offering maximizers opportunities for spontaneity and providing satisficers with occasional structure, the goal was to create a versatile itinerary planning tool that could accommodate the needs of both traveler types effectively.
DEEPER INSIGHTS
Before designing, I conducted a thorough analysis of existing itinerary planning products to identify opportunities for differentiation from competitors.
In a landscape teeming with competition, the trip planning industry features an abundance of tools geared towards organizing travel plans by parsing confirmation emails for flights, hotels, and car rentals. However, a discernible gap exists in products to cater around spontaneity or "filling time"—the kind of exhilarating impulse that strikes when one finds themselves in a new neighborhood after a meal, prompting a desire to dedicate a couple of hours to exploring nearby interests.
The majority of itinerary planning products in the market are tailored for extended trips spanning a couple of days or more. However, what about those moments of spontaneous exploration—those off-the-beaten-path adventures? These are the experiences that often feel more authentic, influenced by locals rather than tourism boards. There was a notable void in customization for such experiences- where users could inform an algorithm about their desired travel distance and the amount of time available for a leisurely passing of time. This realization inspired the concept of introducing a questionnaire that could personalize a curated series of exploratory adventures based on the user's specific preferences and constraints.
EARLY DESIGN STAGE
The concept behind the adventure planner was to leverage user parameters and interests to create a tailored itinerary that eliminates the guesswork from their planning process. This approach aimed to alleviate the cognitive demands both maximizers and satisficers often face when organizing their journeys, particularly when time and money are precious resources.
Informed by insights from user interviews, these essential parameters came to the forefront:
Mode of Travel:
Walking, driving, cycling or scooting
These criteria would materialize as a user-friendly questionnaire and be set by the user, which would subsequently utilize an algorithm to produce the personalized itinerary.
After the itinerary is finalized, the subsequent phase would revolve around navigating between points of interests. During a visit to Balboa Park in San Diego, I seized the opportunity to envision an enhanced pedestrian navigation experience using augmented reality. I chose to explore augmented reality as a product feature after gathering feedback from users who expressed a strong preference for walking and highlighted the challenges of navigating in unfamiliar environments during travel.
The concept involved users holding up their phones to scan the environment, which would then display various points of interest along with their respective distances. Upon selecting a location marker, an information card would appear, offering additional details upon further interaction. As users walk toward a POI, arrows would guide them, with real-time distance updates provided by the location marker. Upon reaching a POI, users receive a notification and could access more information by tapping a prominent icon. When ready to proceed to the next POI, users simply raise their phone to rescan their surroundings and access the AR feature once again.
Sketches of proposed AR feature after exploring existing patterns in Google Maps, Pokemon Go and various interior design AR products.
NAVIGATION ITERATION
As the adventure planner and augmented reality flow began to take form, a sense of incompleteness became apparent. Throughout the interviews, participants consistently highlighted the value of receiving recommendations and guiding from locals. The presence of a knowledgeable companion by one's side significantly enhances the discovery and navigation experiences. This insight sparked the inception of an innovative feature designed to personalize the journey.
The idea took shape to create a digital companion, an adventure planner named Addy. Addy would serve as a personalized guide— an interactive partner in the journey— ready to help plan, assist and navigate.
Addy, like a friend, initiates the planning collaboration process by asking the user about essential journey parameters. Once these essential parameters are collected, Addy's convenience comes into play. A custom route is calculated, taking into account the full spectrum of factors. From there, Addy seamlessly transitions into the role of a real-time guide, using augmented reality (AR) to virtually walk alongside the user, providing step-by-step directions to different destinations.
Arriving at each point of interest (POI), Addy transforms into an informative companion, offering insights and details about the location before guiding the user to their next adventure stop. This holistic and interactive approach ensures that every moment of the journey is enriched with personalization, enhancing the overall exploration experience.
HOW WE GOT THERE
My design strategy was shaped by five key goals that served as guiding principles throughout the development process:
Balancing Maximizers and Satisficers: How can we create a design that effectively caters to both maximizers and satisficers, recognizing their distinct decision-making approaches and ensuring satisfaction for all user types?
Key Parameters: What are the crucial parameters that hold the utmost importance for explorers when crafting their itineraries, allowing us to prioritize and address their core needs?
Seamless Addy Integration: How can we seamlessly and intuitively incorporate Addy, the adventure planner, into the existing product, ensuring a smooth and user-friendly experience?
Dynamic Responsiveness: How do we design a tool that remains dynamically responsive, adapting to user input and preferences, to provide a personalized exploration experience?
Designing for Confidence: How can we instill confidence in our users through the design, ensuring that they trust the tool to guide them on their exploratory journeys with ease and reliability?
These goals underscored the central goal of delivering a user-centric and adaptable exploration experience, where individuals can embark on journeys tailored to their unique preferences, all while feeling confident in the tool's capabilities.
The process of integrating the new feature into the existing Atlas Obscura product began with the fundamental question of where to introduce Addy. Within Atlas Obscura, there are three distinct pages accessible via the footer, each serving a unique purpose.
The first page, often referred to as the homepage, functions as a comprehensive showcase featuring a diverse array of intriguing places from around the world. It serves as a global hub for exploration.
The second page centers around the geolocated map feature, which dynamically references the user's location and presents nearby Points of Interest (POIs) in real time.
The third page is the user's profile page, meticulously recording their visited places, desired destinations, contributed locations, improved spots, and the countries they have ventured to.
Considering the primary purpose of the map feature as the go-to tool for discovering POIs, it became evident that this location was the most intuitive and practical choice for incorporating the adventure planner tool. After all, planning a sequence of POIs to visit is a natural extension of the initial act of discovering a single POI, making it seamlessly integrated into the user's journey.
The idea of incorporating a mascot like Addy was inspired by the intelligent user interfaces seen in products such as Microsoft Office, with a nostalgic nod to the interactive animated character, Clippy, which used to guide users through help content. Additionally, research into Google Maps AR introduced the concept of a 3D interactive fox character that was proposed to add a layer of personalization and user-friendliness to navigation.
While the fox character didn't make it to Google Map's final design, it provided a valuable concept for personalizing navigation. Due to time constraints on the project, creating a 3D character from scratch was not feasible. Instead, I explored the Figma community in search of generic character sources inspired by the gender-neutral and playful cartoony silhouette of minions from Despicable Me. @gouthamgtronics provided a playful cartoon set and after some customization to align with the color scheme of Atlas Obscura, Addy the Adventure Planner was brought to life.
It was paramount to ensure that the user interface (UI) of the added feature felt seamlessly integrated with the existing design. To achieve this cohesion, careful consideration was given to elements such as fonts, cards, color schemes, and icons, with the objective of aligning them as closely as possible with the preexisting styles.
Additionally, the augmented reality (AR) component drew inspiration from the well-established AR product in Google Maps. This approach ensured a familiarity for users and maintained a sense of continuity with widely recognized and trusted design conventions.
FROM PROTOTYPE TO FINAL PRODUCT
Following the completion of the prototype, a moderated usability test was conducted, involving five adult participants. During this test, participants were tasked with accomplishing seven specific tasks, and their interactions and responses were closely observed:
Find Addy the Adventure Planner and curate an adventure: Participants were instructed to locate Addy within the interface and create an adventure itinerary.
Minimize the step-by-step itinerary view: Users were asked to minimize the step-by-step itinerary display to assess the ease of this action.
Learn more about a Point of Interest (POI): Participants had to find additional information about a particular POI to evaluate the accessibility of details.
Eliminate a POI from the itinerary: Users were tasked with removing a POI from the itinerary, assessing the ease of this action.
Decipher the icons on the right: Participants were prompted to interpret the meaning and functionality of the icons displayed on the right side of the map interface.
Use augmented reality to get around: Users were instructed to utilize the augmented reality feature for navigation.
Navigate to the second destination: Participants were asked to navigate to the second destination on their adventure itinerary to assess the efficiency of this process.
The usability test aimed to gather valuable insights into the user experience, ensuring that the design effectively met user needs and expectations while identifying areas for improvement.
KEY IMPROVEMENTS
Before
After
ICON CLARIFICATION
The prior icon collection on the mapped route page confused every user. The icons underwent replacement and reorganization for improved intuition.
Before
After
PREPLAN ITINERARIES
In the past, users were unable to map out their journey prior to arriving at the origin point. A new feature now allows them to enter a starting location, facilitating the ability to plan their travel itinerary beforehand.
Before
After
FLEXIBLE MODIFICATION
Allowing users to modify a planned itinerary was crucial. Originally a long press on the POI marker activated the delete icon. The newest revision readily displays the delete icon on the POI card.
Before
After
not ready, that's ok
Users wanted to inform the product when they were ready to proceed. A simple addition of a descriptor instructing them to scan their surroundings was effective.
The design
During travel moments when everything is demanding your attention, Addy eases the process of exploring new things. Addy helps come up with the perfect itinerary based on what you need and want. Using augmented reality, Addy is there right by you, your personal tour guide from place to place , so you can feel more confident knowing you're making the most of your day.
Navigating in real time with augmented reality guide
FINAL THOUGHTS
Due to time constraints, the primary emphasis during development was on enhancing the user experience within the existing map category of Atlas Obscura. However, with additional time and resources, there are exciting opportunities for expansion and improvement:
Profile Integration: A future plan involves seamlessly integrating the adventure planning feature into the profile category. This could entail introducing a dedicated tile, such as an "Itinerary" tile, within the user's profile. This tile would serve as a hub for managing saved itineraries.
UI and UX Development: Once integrated, there would be room to further refine the user interface and user experience for managing itineraries within the profile. This could involve creating an intuitive and visually appealing interface for users to access and organize their saved adventures.
Personalized Recommendations: Building on the user's previous travel history and preferences, the next step could be to implement a personalized recommendation system. This feature would provide tailored suggestions for new adventures based on the user's unique profile and interests.
Reviews and Testimonials: To enhance user confidence and decision-making, the addition of reviews and testimonials from other travelers could be a valuable feature. Such testimonials would appeal to users with maximizer personalities.
These future developments have the potential to elevate the Atlas Obscura experience, offering users even more comprehensive and personalized tools for planning and enjoying their explorations.
New itinerary tile on profile page to manage itineraries