SmartGuide
Prague Czech Republic
Project Overview
SmartGuide is a travel-based startup located in Prague, Czech Republic, focused on making local-level knowledge about destinations easily accessible without the need for a tour guide. Through the SmartGuide mobile app, users can leverage AI and an extensive informational database to enjoy customizable audio tours of the places or cities they are exploring.
Problem
SmartGuide is a highly complex app that relies on vast amounts of data to provide in-depth audio tours for over 100,000 locations. However, users were becoming overwhelmed by the numerous features and struggled to understand the app’s core functions—namely, the audio tour guide, map, and experience features. As a result, we found that many users disengaged with the app just days after downloading. To address this, we needed to improve the onboarding process to better highlight the app’s primary features and optimize user engagement.
1.0 Research and Discovery
Research Objective
Conduct research through user interviews to understand how new users (with no knowledge of SmartGuide) interacted with the SmartGuide app. Our focus was to identifying confusing features and areas where users deviated from our intended actions.
Target Audience
English-speaking travelers with no previous experience with the SmartGuide application. I specifically targeted travelers that were staying hostels as they were usually traveling alone and most willing to participate in my interviews.
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User Interviews
​​Interview Process: I began by asking participants to download the app and freely explore while I recorded they struggled or deviated from our intended actions. Next, I assigned specific tasks, such as navigating to a particular city or starting a specific audio tour, and recorded whether they successfully completed the tasks as intended. To see the questions I asked click here
Duration & Scope: Over 3 weeks, I conducted 40+ interviews with travelers from 15+ countries.
Key Findings
User Pain Points
Navigation
Most users seemed overwhelmed by all of the options on the home screen and quickly scrolled through, overlooking material that is essential to the onboarding process.
Audio Tour Guide
Many users misunderstood and struggled to use the audio tour guide feature, which allows users to listen to detailed audio descriptions of the historical significance of their destination of interest. -- Note: This is the most important feature of the app and must be clearly understood during the onboarding process. --
Play, Pause, Next
When starting a tour, several users were confused about how to play pause and start the next audio on the tour guide
2.0 Design
Solutions
Considering the pain points identified from the user interviews we next came up with several possible solutions to our problems.
User Pain Points
Navigation
Most users seemed overwhelmed by all of the options on the home screen and quickly scrolled through, overlooking material that is essential to the onboarding process.
Design Solutions
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Implement a simpler UI
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​Add pop down button to display more info
Audio Tour Guide
Many users misunderstood and struggled to use the audio tour guide feature, which allows users to listen to detailed audio descriptions of the historical significance of their destination of interest. -- Note: This is the most important feature of the app and must be clearly understood during the onboarding process. --
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Redesign the UI that it is more clear that the tour has a audio component, i.e adding speaker icon for example​
Play, Pause, Next
When starting a tour, several users were confused about how to play pause and start the next audio on the tour guide
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Make audio component more recognizable and closer to industry standard look i.e a bigger play/pause button at bottom of screen
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Add next track features as well as rewind features.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Navigation: In order to make the home page less overwhelming I changed the Self Guided tour UI, allowing users to easily sor through the tours they wanted by filters. I also added a way to minimize and maximize the tour discription, giving the home page a less cluttered feel while clearly indicating to the user what is on the tour and its descritpion.
Audio / Playback: in order to make the audio component of the tour more recognizable I added a very recognizable play / pause bar to the bottom of the screen. This also served as a way to make it easier for users to navigate through tours by clicking the arrows to skip to the next tour and the circlular arrow signs to fast forward or backward 15 seconds
High Fidelity Prototype
I updated the color scheme from the low-fidelity prototype to make the play bar more distinguishable from other elements in the app. I also set the 'Start Tour' button to automatically trigger the audio playback. Additionally, I added a headphone icon to indicate the currently playing part of the tour, making it clear to users which section is currently playing.
3.0 Validation
Validation Testing
After developing high-fidelity prototypes in Figma to reflect the updated design, I conducted a new round of testing with a focus group of ten users. While some issues remained, users were able to navigate the home screen, audio features, and play bar with significantly less confusion, demonstrating a clearer understanding of the app compared to earlier versions