The initial phase of building the app involved a deep dive into the challenges faced by travelers, drawing from our team's shared experiences and insights gathered from others.

Recognizing the complexities of travel planning, we identified common pain points through extensive research and conversations. Leveraging our collective expertise and fueled by the idea of simplifying decision-making while eliminating biases, the concept of using Generative AI emerged as a transformative solution.

This pivotal question directed us to our How Might We question: "How might we assist travel planners in making decisions tailored to their group?" This then directed our focus towards crafting an innovative solution centered on group-specific decision-making within the domain of travel planning.

During the concept development phase, we fortified our progress by employing various frameworks such as Personas, Value Maps, Vignettes, and Use Cases.

Personas allowed us to create fictional characters representing different user types, ensuring our solutions catered to diverse needs.

Value Maps helped outline the value our app would provide to each persona, ensuring a user-centric approach.

Vignettes aided in storytelling, painting vivid scenarios of how our app would be used in real-life situations.

However, when delving into Use Cases, we initially found ourselves fixating on features rather than user needs, requiring deliberate effort to realign our focus toward addressing user requirements accurately. This phase was crucial in refining our understanding and redirecting our efforts towards user-centric problem-solving rather than feature-centric approaches.

With our concepts solidified, our focus shifted to materializing the envisioned Roam experience. This phase involved the creation of journey maps and user flows.

Journey maps allowed us to visually map out the entire user experience, from initial engagement to the culmination of a trip, enabling us to identify pain points and optimize user interactions at every touchpoint.

Simultaneously, crafting detailed user flows for use case provided a granular understanding of the sequential steps users would take within the app, ensuring a seamless and intuitive navigation experience. These visual tools served as essential blueprints, guiding the design and development process towards realizing a user-friendly and efficient Roam platform.

In this stage, we progressed created prototyped wireframes which underwent rigorous testing with recruited participants. The invaluable feedback obtained included diverse perspectives such as "It feels like a recommendation generator," urging us to enhance the platform's depth beyond mere suggestions.

Further insights like "Make it more fun" prompted us to infuse elements of engagement and delight into the user experience. Additionally, the feedback emphasizing the absence of a visible social aspect highlighted the need to amplify community features within Roam.

Armed with these crucial insights, we iterated on the prototype, implementing necessary adjustments and enhancements to ensure Roam aligned more closely with user expectations and desires.

As our concept matured, the focus shifted towards refining the user interface for consistency and creating a distinctive logo emblematic of our app's essence.

I created a UI Kit to ensure uniformity and coherence across Roam's design elements. Simultaneously, crafting a representative logo served as a visual anchor for the app's identity.

Transitioning to high-fidelity prototypes, we meticulously designed an inclusive onboarding sequence to familiarize users with Roam's features. The prototypes encapsulated an onboarding sequence, core functionalities of the app, as well as a dedicated settings page to provide users with the flexibility to control and toggle the AI-powered functionalities according to their preferences.

Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech

Grace Parks Hall
Jerick Evans

JoEllen Kames & Jen Levin