Invenio
It’s all too common for people to fall into a routine of activities, not looking to find new activities either because it is too difficult to find ideas that meet their interests, or they aren’t interested in stepping out of their comfort zone. Almost every city has an immense amount of unique offerings from restaurants, entertainment, one-time events, and many more. However, having so many options makes it hard for residents to sift through them all to find the ones that suit their individual interests. Current technologies don’t provide a solution for allowing users to filter their interests, and so Invenio strives to fill that gap by providing personalized activity recommendations that encourage users to try out things in their city that they may not have known about previously.
Summary
Invenio generates recommendations based on the user’s location as well as general categories that the user selects upon signup. When making an account, users can select any interests they have from a broad list, such as Entertainment, Food & Drink, Outdoors, and many more. After finalizing their selections, the app lets users refine these categories by offering specifics interests for users to select. For example, if a user selected Entertainment, they could select specific interests such as Movies, Concerts, Recreation, etc. By having users complete this process upon registration, Invenio has a starting point of what kinds of activities to recommend to the user.
The application’s main user flow uses an interface in the same style as Tinder, displaying each suggestion one at a time. Users can view more details about a suggestion or swipe right/left to dislike the activity. By displaying one activity at a time, this makes the user decide whether they like or dislike each activity, giving the application more information about the user’s interests. This allows Invenio to constantly refine its perception of what the user would enjoy, making the personalization more and more accurate as time goes on.
Research and Requirements
Our team conducted interviews to determine the preferences and requirements of users regarding recommendations of new activities and outings in their city, and we researched applications that provide similar services. Based on our findings, we established the following design requirements:
Personalization
The app will record user interests
The app will constantly refine its idea of the user’s interests
The app will suggest restaurants/activities that meet user’s interests
Suggestions will use GPS in order to be relevant and accurate
Users can save recommendations that interest them
Provide sufficient details about the activities
The description of the activity will include all necessary details
Every recommendation will display photos and videos
Users can easily access the establishment’s website
Contact and location information will be provided
Ratings and reviews by other users will be shown
Social aspects
Users can view other people who have favorited a given activity
There will be some method of contacting other users
Facebook can be linked to share events with friends
Paper Prototype
The following are some example screens from the paper prototype our team created. Following the creation of this prototype, we conducted a cognitive walkthrough that helped inform design decisions when transitioning to a digital prototype.
Digital Prototype
We used Marvel to design the dynamic prototype for our application. There are three parts of the high-fidelity prototype: the personalization, activities’ information, and user profile. The personalization part is at the beginning of our app. After registering, it will show activities categories and specifics to let the user choose. Then the user will see the personalized homepage. There are three parts in the homepage, the recommendations, popular activities and custom categories. If user clicks on view all, it will show an activity. Swiping left means dislike, swipe right means like. Click on the details, it will show more information about the activity, including time, address, description, coupons, price, reviews etc. By clicking on the register and adding personal information, the user can complete the whole process.
Based on the usability testing, we made some changes to the low-fidelity prototype. Then we designed the high-fidelity prototype. We designed the logo of Invenio, decided the main color, the font, and the font size. Then we separated the whole screens into three parts, the personalization, activities’ information and user profile. After that, we created the user flow of each part, make sure the sequence of each screen had proper interaction.
