Mini Miles

Most families take roadtrips. While these trips can be great experiences that form lasting memories, things don’t always go smoothly. Parents often have to deal with: 

• Hungry Children
• Restless & Bored Children
• Screaming
• Crying
• Siblings Fighting
• Frequent Bathroom Stops
• Unplanned Stops

Kids will be kids. But how can parents plan for the expected and unexpected at the same time for a smoother trip? That's what I wanted to solve. I started by looking at similar apps and doing a competitive analysis. Those findings as as follows:

After completing my competitive analysis, I set out to find out what actual parents really needed. I conducted user interviews with 10 moms and 3 dads. For the purpose of these interviews, I defined “Road Trip” as anything that involves journeying on the road, away from home with their family. The survey can be viewed here and the results can be viewed here. 

Here are some of my favorite quotes from those interviews:

From the commonalities found in my research, I created the following three personas:

All of these personas, need help planning for the expected & unexpected and to make sure the driver can focus. They all want their children to learn and grow from their experiences. And most importantly, they want their family to have a great time! Enter...

Mini Miles a parents wingman while on the road.

It is a one stop mobile app that helps them navigate and plan road trips that are tailored specifically to their family. Mini Miles also helps parents search along the road for essentials like food and changing tables so that they can plan for the unexpected. Our goal is to make this the best road trip yet!

To start, I looked worked on the following feature analysis and prioritization:

In looking at the competing apps, I noticed it was important to elevate the search to the home screen. Why? Let's look at two flows from the competition using the task of finding a changing table as an example: 

As you can see, there are often many steps or specific categories are hard to find. For a parent who is driving and/or dealing with children, every second counts. I worked on sketching this out on the home screen, as well as strategizing the UX for the rest of the app. Below is a sneak peek into my iterative process. You can see the full app sketched as it stands here. 

From these sketches, I came up with a home screen that presented more tailored options for parents as well as one that brought key search items into the thumb zone. A sample user flow is as follows:

After sketching, I moved on to more high fidelity wireframes and created a prototype for user testing. The task was to find a changing table. Key findings from this user test are as follows:

After my first test, I made some modifications to my prototype and created a new one. I then completed a second round of user testing. I tested half my subjects with the sound of a infant crying to see if that would cause any changes. The main difference I saw was that the users who heard the infant crying went through the prompts I provided with more urgency.  Some of the results of that test are as follows:

After multiple rounds of user testing, I fully flushed out a few main flows for the app. 

Screens showing the "Search from the Home Screen" flow

You can explore the InVision Prototype here.