Studies

1. User

Our project consists in changing the whole experience of travelling to other countries, a different way to get to know different cultures and places, which means the user is a keyfactor to the development of the final product.

We proceeded to a direct study with possible users of our application, this way we could gather all information about what are the needs of users and what they expect from a plataform like the one we are developing. We started by making a little quiz on the matter to which 21 people answered. On the question "You think there's a lack of connection between foreign students/travellers and the local people in your hometown?" 80% answered yes, this making us focus on ways to improve the communication between travelers and locals through our application, we came up with solutions as an interactive local events feed with comments and an "Ask Arround" feed, with recent questions and answers made by locals and travelers arround the user on different categorized topics. *grafic here*

All the other statistics we gathered all joined to the same conclusion we had previously on how to approach the problem and its solutions, that being a real time interaction with travelers and locals near the user, giving each user the option to ask and receive a real time answer from a local or looking for other users answers to previous questions on various topics, also knowing the location of other users near you which might lead to a more direct interaction hopefully leading to diffrent social experiences and culture sharing. From the view of a traveller user the visiting the visiting of certain cultural/historical areas is very important, so a task this plataform will have to perform will have to be to provide a maped guidence (through GPS) to certain interest points recommended by other users.

Based on all the information gathered we developed a low fidelity prototype in flash (actionscript 2.0) to decide how would all the tasks that the application would have to perform be executed, in a intuitive, fast and simple way.

With the low-fidelity prototype in flash we came to the conclusion that one main button to access all main tasks of the product should be accessible from every different current "page" that the user is viewing would make all the interaction between the user and the software faster and simpler.

After some experimenting we decided the base structure of how the application would have to be "organized", so that an user that is using it for the first time can discover how to perform any task wanted within very few clicks, that way the user will be able to access all information that our project plans to provide, in each respective task, in the fastest way possible, without the user being confused with the way it has to interact with the application.