Overview

Length

10 weeks

Role

Project manager

Tools

Figma

Team

Deni Simeonov, Haemi Kwon, Thanhtruc Nghiem, Kristine Duong, Megan Powell, Kiro Kilinski

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Prototype

Case study

Connecting everyone and everything in the palm of your hand.

Sherpa started as out with the foundation of connection. We wanted users to connect on a global scale in order to make their travels easier. Throughout our process, Sherpa evolved into more than connection, it evolved into discovery and planning. In its final form, Sherpa is the only travel app you will ever need.

What did we expect? What were we trying to solve?

The initial pitch for Sherpa revolved all around connecting with local guides to chat and gain some information about travel. I wanted to solve the problem that has arisen in the past decade due to social media, the fact that many discovery tools are now formulated and recycled. When you try to look something up, you'll get similar results each time and it didn't feel genuine, so Sherpa was an attempt to solve that.

What did we end up with?

Ultimately our research guided us in a different direction than we originally had planned. The final prototype features an extensive planner and location discovery tools. We shifted our focus to these other features, but we never lost track of our heritage, the connection with local guides.

What did we learn?

We learned that in order to succeed, we have to be adaptable and passionate. Our team strived to create a product that we were all proud of and want to show to the world, but that's only half the challenge. We had to adapt our strategies and brainstorm many times throughout the process becuase of new information we had discovered. We overcame our adversities and ended up with a product that's a result of passion, adaptability, and team work.

Process

Project Motivation

Creating senior project

Project Type

UI/UX project development

Skills Learned/Used

GDD, Figma, project management

View prototype

Prototype

Overview

Background

Where did the idea come from?

Recently in my life, many people had told me of travel experiences they'd had in the past year. The common issue I heard from them is that discovering places to visit felt like a chore and that it was hard to figure out what was right and what was wrong.

Hearing this over and over again, I knew I had something that I could work with. I had a common pain-point that I could try to solve. And thus, Sherpa came to be.

How did the project come about?

It's my senior year of college, my last semester before I'm out in the real world, fending for myself. I had gone into my senior project class knowing that this project would be the culmination of everything I had done so far in my program. There was a lot of weight on my shoulders, knowing that this project was the single most important thing I will have worked on in my life thus far. The pressure was on, but that never held me back from anything.

I setup my pitch for Sherpa, an app to connect users to locals where they'd chat about locations to travel to. I knew I had to sell myself strong to the class, as many other people likely had projects that were just as passionate as mine. The time came, I walked up and presented, and then the storm settled down and I waited. Miraciously, I had 3 new people come up to me willing to join my group, alongside the 2 friends I already had who were down. This is where it started, the formation of the dream team, and the beggining of Sherpa.

Process

Research phase

It's rare that you get placed into a team where everyone is passionate and gets along well, but somehow it happened at the perfect time. Our team was full of talent, passion, and enthusiasm, something I knew, as the project manager, I had to take advantage of. I planned out our schedule for the course of the project and hit the ground running, eager to see what all of our combined efforts could produce.

This project was different than the other one I had lead, there was no slack from the team. Nobody was getting pulled along, everyone was holding their own. Our team blazed through the first parts of our process, and with everyone on the same page, we were eager to keep moving forward fast so we would have time to polish our protoype in the end.

Initial setback

As our group kept pushing forward with our project, our direct supervisors (professors) had to rearrange the schedule they initially planned for the class. This change ended up setting us back a bit, as we had to reformat our work to meet the submission sooner than we initially anticipated. As the project manager, I did my best to keep us pushing forward and tried to evenly distribute the work amongst the team so we all only had small portions to focus on and could still keep our eyes locked on the main objective of the project.

This was a pivotal step in keeping us on track, as everyone still had the time and energy to focus on the bigger portions of work we had to complete (user interviews and data analysis). I wanted to not only keep the project as a whole on track, but I wanted everyone on the team to feel like we each contributed the same amount of work into this project, that way we could all be equally proud of the final work.

Wireframing and design

Now with the team recentered and focused, we began to discuss design. This is where everyones ideas came together in a melting pot, alongside the data we gathered from our users. This ultimately is where the goal of the app changed. I originally envisioned a simple chat between travelers to discuss locations, but when everyone poured out their ideas, I knew there was a lot more we were going to design.

We now planned to create an all-in-one travel app. This would solve the common pain point our users faced, struggling to retain and keep track of their travel information, as well as solving the original problem I had envisioned, linking travelers to locals. It would be a tall task, but I wouldn't trust any other team to do it than this one.

The great divide

With minimal time left for the project and a mountain of work in Figma, I had to think up a solution for our lack of time. It took a couple long, warm showers, but it finally came to me. I would have us all work on the initial prototyping, thus setting us up with a strong base for our app to work with while giving everyone a fairly managable amount of work to complete. Afterwards, the team would split into 2 (and a half?) to each take on their own tasks.

The first team, design team, would be in charge of polishing up the design we had initially made in Figma. They would create some visual assets for use in the app, such as the logo and maybe a mascot, and polish up some issues with the prototype. This team had to have the most seasoned Figma veterans, those who knew the in's and out's of the platform.

The second team, usability team, would be in charge of our usability testing. They would find 3 users of our target demographic to run a usability test with and analyze the data before giving it back to the design team. My plan was to have people who weren't as familiar with usability testing on this team so that they could learn the process more, since at the end of they day this is a learning process for all of us.

Afterwards, the teams would come together and work on polishing up any final problems with the prototype. Now the half team, that was me. As the group leader, I wanted to make sure all of our submissions were taken care of, so I took a step back for a little bit (before returning to design team) to finish up and submit our required submissions. The plan was flawless. Not only would this save us about a week worth of time, it would also play to everyones strenghts and help everyone learn more.

The showcase

With our project finalized and polished, the day of our showcase had finally arrived. There was a nervous energy, rightfully so, as this showcase could secure each of our futures as designers. We had a project to be proud of and now we had an event so show it off at. It was an opportunity we were greatful to have, as it wasn't going to happen at first.

We all came together and setup our table. We had many people come and talk to us throughout the event and each of us had a chance to talk to multiple people, as well as walking around to see the other groups projects. Overall, the event went great and I left the room feeling like I left a good impression on the community that showed up.

I'm glad I got to work with such a great team and put together such a phenomenal project. We really left no stone unturned with the final prototype and I can only hope that the rest of the team feels the same way I do.

Reflection

What could we have done differently?

I think the team did a great job overall and there's nothing more I could've asked for from them. The main things that I could've done differently as the project manager would be to keep the drive going throughout the project more and to make more definitive decisions on my own rather than throwing out an idea and hoping the team will come to a decision.

Final thoughts

This project represents a lot of time, effort, passion, talent, and teamwork, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. My team was great and I hope they are just as proud of the project as I am.

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