Smart Travel Assistant
End-to-end Smart Travel Assistant for international fliers.
Description: During the last five months of MSTI masters program I worked with a team of four students and representatives from a major airplane manufacturer to do research, develop a concept and build a prototype of a mobile application that is intended to assist travelers during their journey.
Problem:
International travelers departing from and arriving to major Chinese airports today face challenges in navigating the airport due to linguistic and cultural differences, a lack of relevant centralized information and understanding of airport procedures in China. With the expected increase in passengers in these airports it is extremely important to develop a scalable solution that helps international passengers to streamline their travel experience.
Solution:
The complete solution that the team came up with consists of:
- Mobile application providing location aware, personalized smart assistance for travelers
- Content Management System for managing the content within the mobile application: airport information, terminal information, country and city information, security and immigration procedures / rules
- Integration with bluetooth beacons at airports
- Data sources (APIs) for the features within the application: flight information data, airport data, transportation data and more
- Partnerships with airports, government, data providers
Please take a look at the integration of mobile app and bluetooth beacons in the airports:
Airport diagram
People: Besides me, there were 3 other people on the project: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer, Business person.
Maks’ Role: During this project, I lead a multidisciplinary team and acted as main point of contact between the students and the company partners. My responsibilities in the project included:
- Product management: coming up with the vision of the product, ensuring that the team has common goals
- Leading the team: resolving conflicts, conducting meetings, inspiring, leading brainstorming sessions, cultivating a productive environment, holding individuals to high professional standards
- Project management: work breakdown structure, planning sprints, distributing work, ensuring that that individuals are on track
- Research: market research, Intellectual property research, beacon and proximity technology research, user experience research
- Concept Development: Storyboarding, wireframing, user journey mapping, user testing, user flow diagramming
- Business Development: market research, business model development
- Product Development: Technology architecture, Android App development, Content Management System Development, proximity technology integration, API integration
Software: During this project, I used the following software:
- Android Studio
- Sketch
- Adobe Illustrator
- Google Docs
- LucidChart
- InVision
- GanttProject
- Torch AR prototyping app
- PHPStorm
Android Application prototype:
I learned Android Application Development and built an application that interacts with Bluetooth Beacons positioned in different places inside a building. Here is a video demo of the application prototype in action. As the beacons are approached, various sections of the application expand automatically, guiding the user about the actions that need to be taken at the location that they are approaching.
Application UI:
We’ve developed over 20 screens that would make up the application and did user testing on some of the screens to adjust positioning, labeling and navigation:
Application UI
Interactive Prototype:
When we had the screens ready, we’ve developed an interactive prototype for user testing.
Project Media:
