1. 'Hit the Road'
- your road trip planner
INF 385T: Mobile Interface Design
Group 4: Victoria Solomon & Ashwini Kamath
4/30/2013

2. What we will go over
§ About the app
§ Initial User Research
§ Design Concept & Approach
§ Design Development
o Low-fi prototype
o Hi-fi prototype
§ Interaction Example
§ Lesson learnt
§ Heuristic Evaluation
§ Recommendations for further design

3. About Hit the Road
§ A mobile application that helps users plan and
execute multi-stop road trips.
§ Assists users with:
o route planning
o time until destination
o locating nearby services + attractions
§ Designed for iPhone users in America.

4. Initial User Research:
Lessons Learnt
§ User types
o Road Trip Newbie: a user planning / going on a
roadtrip for the first time
o Solo Explorer: a user who plans / goes on road
trips mostly by him or herself
§ User Tasks
o Find a pet-friendly stopover location
o Connect with friends & family while en route
o Reroute a trip along the way

5. Design Concept:
App Goals
Provide users with the ability to quickly plan a road trip
using only their mobile & without consulting an
additional device.
o Calculating the distance to a specified destination.
o Regularly updating distance to specified
destination.
o Directing users to convenient stops along their way.
o Automatically dividing a long road trip into
convenient parts.

6. Design Concept:
Approach
§ Focus on core functions / elements vs. visual
design
§ Paper-based prototypes
§ Interaction flow diagram
§ "Sketchy" low-fi prototypes in Balsamiq, with
limited interactivity

7. Design Concept:
Low-Fi Prototypes

8. Low-Fi to Hi-Fi:
The Transition
§ "Sketchy" low-fi prototypes in Balsamiq
§ Cognitive Walkthrough using 3 user tasks
o find a pet friendly stopover
o set up notifiers to send along the way
o reroute a trip while traveling
§ Revised low-fi prototype based on responses
§ Hi-fi prototype using Proto.io
o (prototype 1 > heuristic eval. > prototype 2)

9. Hi-Fi Prototype:
Let's Create a New Trip
1 2 3

10. Hi-Fi Prototype:
Let's Create a New Trip
4 5 6

11. Hi-Fi Prototype:
Let's Create a New Trip
7 8 9

12. Prototyping Methods:
Lessons Learnt
§ Helped organize the interaction flow
§ Helped understand the scale / size of the system we
were designing for
§ Helped easily spot problems in the interface design
§ Allowed us to get user-feedback on our design
regularly through cognitive analysis and heuristic
evaluation
§ Prompted us to learn about industry design standards
(iPhone)

13. Heuristic Evaluation:
Summary of findings
Feedback from the heuristic evaluations suggested that our team
needed to rethink the interactions flow for creating and sending Notifiers.
Our team separated the Notifier screens from the Create New Trip
interactions and created a new notifier-specific interaction flow.

14. Heuristic Evaluation:
Summary of findings
Based on additional feedback from our heuristic evaluation, we added a
trip review screen after users select a trip from My Saved Trips.

15. Heuristic Evaluation:
Summary of findings
Heuristic evaluation feedback also included usability recommendations
that we incorporated into our final prototype.

16. Recommendations for
Further Design
§ Inbuilt maps, i.e. does not link to external maps app
§ Link to apps such as Yelp for reviews of attractions /
facilities along the way
§ Voice integration
§ A Hit the Road app community to share trips + provide
feedback and recommendations
§ Integrated weather report and advisories
§ Fuel optimization aid

17. Ashwini A. Kamath
kamath.ash@utexas.edu
www.ashwinikamath.com#