CASE STUDY
End-To-End Mobile Application
Project Overview
Highlights
Tools
Figma, FigJam
ChatGPT, Midjourney
Context
Designlab Project
Modern tourism has been known to negatively impact the cultural and environmental integrity of popular travel destinations. Many tourists, despite good intentions, inadvertently contribute to these challenges due to a lack of awareness and appropriate engagement opportunities.
The Problem (in 50 words or less)
Kōkua is designed to foster respectful and contributory travel through three foundational pillars: education, credibility & trust, and genuine need. The app connects travelers with verified volunteer opportunities, provides educational content to promote responsible tourism, and ensures that volunteer efforts meet genuine community needs.
The Solution (in 50 words or less)
Introduction
Named after the Hawaiian translation of “help”, Kōkua aims to foster a form of travel that is not only respectful, but also contributory. The platform is meant to empower travelers to give back to the communities that they so love, and enhance the awareness and participation of visitors in local community efforts. As a result, communities of popular travel destinations can benefit, and tourism can begin to be seen in a better light all around.
At its core, Kōkua is built on the pillars of education, credibility & trust, and genuine need. Through verified partnerships with local organizations across the world and a strategic interface that highlights communities' most pressing needs, Kōkua can push acts of travel volunteering to be impactful, ethical, and harmonious with the local ethos of various communities. The platform isn’t just about matching volunteers with opportunities; it’s about fostering a community of mindful travelers and welcoming hosts, all working towards a shared vision of sustainable tourism.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Context - The Problem & The Vision
The concept of tourism can be traced back to the 17th century, when European nobles and members of royal families would travel with the purpose of becoming better versed in history, art, and cultural heritage. While the original purposes of tourism may have been well-intentioned, Carmen Periz Rodriguez explains in her blog post for the Europeana Common Culture project that modern tourism tends to affect the social structures, culture, and lifestyle of those in the destinations visited. She explains that:
“The challenge now is to provide solutions by developing a tourism awareness that is respectful with the environment and the local way of living of its inhabitants.”
One location in particular that has struggled over the years with the opposing forces between tourists and natives/residents is the islands of Hawai’i. From visitors failing to clean up after themselves on culturally significant lands, to deforestation and habitat loss for the sake of tourism infrastructure - Hawai’i has certainly seen its fair share of negative impacts from tourism.
Despite these struggles that come with being such a popular travel destination, Hawai’i has shown a willingness to share their culture with the outside world in an attempt to educate its visitors on why taking care of the land and its people is integral to the very culture that attracts tourism in the first place. I believe their outspoken nature on the issues surrounding tourism has raised awareness overtime, causing some visitors to have a desire to give back. Natalie Schack describes the recent uptick in Hawai’i travelers seeking “voluntourism” experiences well in her article for Hawaii Business magazine:
“It’s about benefiting the community while meeting the demands of the modern traveler for local, authentic experiences that are doable and short-term.”
As tourism continues to be the norm in our modern world, its crucial that we find a solution to the strain that it can sometimes bring with it. For those looking to give back to the communities they are visiting, it is important that they:
Volunteer for the right reasons
Verify the legitimacy of groups organizing volunteer efforts
Ensure the volunteer work they plan to do is actually needed in the community
There is a fine line between tourism and exploitation. While there are unfortunately some tourists with genuine ill will, I believe from personal experience that the majority of tourists around the world mean no harm; and if their visiting of destinations does cause harm, I believe that in most cases it is simply due to ignorance. It is vital that we work to find a solution to steer well-intentioned travelers in the right direction.
Conducting a Competitive Analysis
I conducted a competitive analysis of three indirect competitors that are roughly related to Kōkua to understand the landscape of existing platforms and identify opportunities for innovation. Taking an in-depth look at these three applications offered insights into user engagement, mission alignment, and market needs. After conducting a detailed comparison that highlighted their strengths, weaknesses, and key features, I was left with a useful context for how Kōkua can differentiate itself in the market.
Here are the competitors’ descriptions, mission statements, and my notes/takeaways from each of them:
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Lemu is a platform for climate change solutions. The Lemu app empowers users to support conservation projects and play a part in fighting the environmental crisis.
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“Our goal is to be responsible for financing the protection of 1% of our Planet’s land within the next 10 years... and for that, we need to act together.”
”Our core values are shaped by protection and care, kindness, innovation, empathy, and diversity.”
Lemu is committed to using technology to harness collective intelligence and improve life for all of Mother Earth’s inhabitants.
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Lemu has great credibility and shows transparency by clearly linking project contacts and sources. The definitions for common environmental terms is a very nice touch, and allowing users to earn badges is a very smart way to encourage platform activity in a social manner.
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AllTrails is a user’s companion and guide to the outdoors. If offers ways to discover trails for every occasion, custom route planning, all need-to-know info about particular trails, and more.
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“We connect people to the outdoors. Our mission is simple: to kindle the spirit of adventure.”
“AllTrails was founded on the idea that we’re all made better by spending time in nature.”
Some of their values are: spread the stoke, lead by example, embrace change, stay down to earth, all are welcome.
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To me, the highlight in the AllTrails app is the prioritization of information and the fact that they utilize crowd-sourced information - each ‘trail’ has ample user reviews, allowing those interested to see tons of information and other peoples’ thoughts/tips that might not be already listed.
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Imprint helps users understand complex topics quickly with elegant visuals that clarify key ideas and help to maintain focus. Imprint condenses content from the world’s most-respected experts, courses, and books into “bite-sized learning” cards.
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“Our mission is to make the world’s most important knowledge easy to learn, internalize, and apply to your life. By visualizing and clarifying complex insights from the world’s greatest thinkers, we’re helping people around the world master essential topics and learn new skills, quickly and easily.”
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The stand-out thing that I love about Imprint is the subtle stylistic differentiation between app navigation and interactive lessons. A simple change in font from sans-serif to serif signals when the user is in navigation mode vs learning mode - a very elegant design choice that serves a purpose.
Conducting User Interviews
I selected interview participants with the criteria that they had to have participated in volunteering activities while traveling in the past. I conducted an in-person group interview with four participants who met this criteria, which proved to be a very positive interviewing experience. The group-style setting made my participants feel very at ease as I loosely guided the open flowing conversation. Cautious of peer influence, I frequently reminded my focus group that this was a safe, confidential space and that their unique opinions and views amongst each other would be respected and valued. I guided the group discussion with the following intentions:
Research Goals
Understand the motivations and perceptions of travelers regarding travel volunteering
Gauge awareness for culturally respectful tourism and identify any educational gaps and needs in facilitating impactful travel volunteering experiences
Explore the motivations and challenges travelers have when seeking to engage in community-supportive tourism
What I Aimed to Learn
How do travelers perceive volunteer impact on local communities they visit?
What motivates tourists to engage in volunteering activities during their travels?
How do travelers seek out and verify authentic, legitimate, and community-beneficial volunteer opportunities?
What are the key factors that travelers consider when deciding to engage in local volunteer efforts?
SYNTHESIZING INFORMATION
Organizing Research Findings
After conducting user interviews, I gathered my insights on travel volunteering and did some affinity mapping to identify trends and patterns.
Some notable categories of observed patterns were:
The effects of tourism & thoughts on practicing responsible tourism
Volunteering motivations & preferences
Travel volunteering concerns, needs, & expectations
Trust, learning, & seeking information
The importance of culture & personal experiences when traveling
I then leveraged these insights to identify some key strategies and opportunities that the Kōkua app could implement. This exercise got me started with ideating specific action-items to guide my design decisions moving forward:
Empathizing to Define Research-Based Goals
User Personas
In an attempt to sum up what I learned from my secondary research and interviews, I created two distinct personas to encapsulate the diverse motivations and needs of potential users.
Joelle is driven by her love for authentic cultural immersion and meaningful community interactions during her travels, while Alex is motivated by a lifelong commitment to community service and sustainability.
Holistic Thinking
Following my effort to empathize with target users, I then created a Venn diagram to align these personas’ goals with Kōkua’s business objectives. This exercise served as a way to visualize goals that support both user satisfaction and business success, pushing me to think holistically about how user needs intersect with feasible business goals.
Here is one of the shared user and business goals that I’m particularly attached to, as I personally find credibility extremely important in the apps that I use on a regular basis:
Remain committed to vetting volunteer opportunities and providing detailed information about them, meeting users’ needs for trustworthy experiences while establishing the platform’s credibility and reliability.
Kōkua’s Core Values
Tying the research and discovery phase all together, I developed the three pillars that the Kōkua brand and values would be built on:
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Research Finding: Tourists that are ignorant or oblivious to their travel destinations’ local cultures and the challenges that they face are often perceived by locals/residents as unwelcomed consumers who take what they please. Educating tourists about how they can be contributors and not just mere consumers during their travels can lead to more respectful and enriching interactions.
Goal: Integrate educational content for users to learn about the good that can come from the spirit of kōkua (help) in order to promote responsible tourism to travelers. This could instill a more mindful and respectful outlook on travelers, and might help locals/residents to develop a more welcoming viewpoint on tourism.
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Research Finding: Volunteer efforts can sometimes have questionable impact if those organizing them have ulterior motives or are poorly aligned with the communities that they aim to help.
Goal: Implement a vetting system for all volunteer opportunities and organizers so that positive impact and integrity of volunteer efforts can be maximized, and so that users feel they can trust the intentions and motivations of organizations hosting volunteer events.
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Research Finding: Many volunteer efforts, although well-intentioned, often fail to meet the actual needs of a community, leading to wasted resources and opportunities. Volunteers can also tend to get so caught up with giving aid in ways that are convenient and enjoyable for themselves that they fail to truly listen and understand what exactly might help a community the most.
Goal: Avoid inferior travel volunteer activities and maximize positive impacts by informing users about a community’s current and top needs and facilitating feedback from locals/residents to validate whether or not volunteer efforts were successful. This can ensure that users are well-informed about the needs of a particular travel destination, thus influencing their decisions on how they’d like to help when searching for volunteer opportunities.
IDEATION & DEVELOPMENT
Developing Problem Statements
By following a simple formula for my POV and HMW statements, I could easily dive deep into the following problem sets to develop dimensional problem statements, helping me to turn my research findings into a jumping-off point for further ideation and ensuring that my next steps were well rooted in the discovery and synthesis phases.
Opportunity
Idea
Benefit
Who
What
Why
Problem Set #1: Authentic Experiences & Responsible Tourism
POV: I’d like to explore ways to help travelers to engage meaningfully with local communities that they visit because understanding and respecting local cultures and environments can improve both the overall travel experience and a destination’s overall well-being. This will foster more responsible tourism and positive interactions between visitors and locals through authenticity and memory-forging experiences.
HMW: How might we create a platform that educates travelers about the cultural and environmental significance of their destinations so that their visits can be less detrimental and more contributory to local communities?
Problem Statement: Travelers often lack awareness of how their behaviors impact the cultural and environmental well-being of their travel destinations. This disconnect contributes to unintentional harm and missed opportunities for positive impact with local communities. The challenge is to develop a platform that not only educates tourists about responsible tourism practices but also facilitates genuine interactions, resulting in travel experiences being beneficial to both visitors and hosts.
Problem Set #2: Balancing Impacts Through a Symbiotic Relationship
POV: I’d like to explore ways to help tourists who are interested in volunteering to connect with local organizations around the world because many travelers who feel bad about their negative impact as tourists don’t know where to begin with seeking volunteering opportunities. This will provide communities with the support they need while simultaneously enriching tourists’ travel experiences.
HMW: How might we facilitate connections between tourists looking to volunteer and local organizations in need of help so that both can benefit from more sustainable tourism and impactful volunteering opportunities?
Problem Statement: Many travelers who wish to positively impact the destinations they visit struggle to find legitimate and impactful volunteer opportunities. This hinders the potential for tourists to contribute meaningfully to local communities and to experience the deeper cultural immersion they seek. I aim to develop a way to efficiently match willing tourists with verified local organizations in need, allowing both to benefit from sustainable tourism and meaningful exchanges between visitors and locals.
Problem Set #3: Legitimacy & Building Trust
POV: I’d like to explore ways to help users to feel assured about the legitimacy and impact of their volunteer work because a lack of transparency and trust can deter well-intentioned travelers from engaging in the platform. This will encourage more travelers to volunteer, knowing their efforts are truly beneficial.
HMW: How might we implement a transparent vetting process for volunteer opportunities and provide detailed information about the organization’s mission so that Kōkua can build trust with its users and encourage participation?
Problem Statement: Travelers looking to volunteer abroad often have uncertainties regarding the transparency, legitimacy, and impact of volunteer opportunities. This lack of trust discourages potential volunteers from participating in otherwise beneficial activities. To address this, there’s a need for a method of assuring volunteers of the authenticity and positive impact of their contributions to foster a trusted network for engagement and participation.
Prioritizing Features
After articulating clear problem statements grounded in user research, I conceptualized features that were intentional and aligned with the core user/business goals. These are some of the top priority features that formed the backbone of the app’s MVP, along with supporting research from interviews:
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One of the biggest obstacles for travelers who want to donate their time and efforts is struggling to find legitimate and well-aligned opportunities within their travel constraints
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Users prioritize trust in organizations when searching for volunteering events, indicating a need for clear indicators of legitimacy
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Requiring event facilitators to provide ample information will ensure that activities are well-organized, that local needs are effectively met, and that participants can come prepared and well-informed
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Feedback from local communities is essential in validating the impact of volunteer efforts to ensure the work being done is not inferior, but instead, aligned with a community's needs
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Education on things such as cultural norms and social issues of destinations can enable travelers to practice responsible tourism, potentially easing tension and strain within the local-tourist relationship
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Users expressed that when donating or volunteering, it is important to them to make sure they feel good about the people/organizations that they are supporting and representing
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Users are more likely to volunteer if they can make it a socializing/bonding experience and if they can do so with friends or family (for a feeling of both community and safety)
Information Architecture
I created a detailed outline of Kōkua’s information architecture to organize content effectively based on the user needs, expectations, and pain points that I previously discovered and identified with my user personas. This rough sitemap served as the blueprint for the app’s structure. As I moved on to detailing user flows, I found that this step was crucial for developing a coherent user experience. I aimed to make sure that each app component supported Kōkua’s mission to promote responsible tourism and impactful volunteering.
User Flows
Now with a structured outline for my information architecture and the interconnections between different app sections, I was able to clearly visualize various user journeys. A key focus while mapping out user flows was to ensure that the core functionalities not only adhered to user needs, but also aligned with Kōkua’s foundational pillars: education, credibility & trust, and genuine need. This led to my decisions about what user flows were most important and critical to identify:
The ‘Volunteer’ flow (enabling users to search for and sign up for volunteer events that align with their travel plans) was developed as the central activity of the platform. This flow was critical to Kōkua’s MVP and overall user engagement strategy. While I didn’t design each and every screen for the full flow of signing up for events, the GIFs below showcase the event details users would see when browsing volunteer opportunities and how they would stay in the loop with their upcoming and previous events. The My Events tab is key for empowering users to come to events well-prepared and to have a way to keep tabs on their event’s impact/effectiveness.
The ‘Learn Needs’ and ‘Educate Myself’ flows were made to further support the brand’s pillars of education and genuine need. As demonstrated below, these flows are instrumental in educating users about the specific needs of the communities they visit and in promoting responsible tourism practices.
DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION
Branding & Style
Diving into the development of Kōkua’s style, I did some mood boarding to try and gain some momentum before attempting to create a meaningful logo. I was very inspired by nature’s greens and blues, which led to the app’s primary color being a blend of both.
Circling back to the islands of Hawai’i which originally inspired the idea for this platform, I knew that the kalo plant has great significance in Hawaiian culture and has been harvested by Hawaiians since ancient times.
Upon reading more about the kalo plant’s significance, I learned of a Hawaiian mythology story of how the first kalo plant sprouted from the burial site of a stillborn child, providing sustained nourishment for the Hawaiian people.
Relating this bittersweet story of continued nourishment sprouting from a tragic event, I felt the kalo plant was a perfect symbol for Kōkua and it’s mission to transform strained modern tourism into sustainable tourism.
Wireframes to High Fidelity
Rough Hand-Sketched Wireframes
First Digital Iteration
With this initial prototype, I conducted an early round of usability tests with three participants, first giving them a verbal introduction to help them understand what the app entails and the purpose/function behind it. Then I had them execute three simple navigational tasks.
The app was generally very well received with users even expressing some fascination and excitement around the platform’s functions, uses, and overall mission.
Aside from well-received initial reactions, most of my takeaways from testing my first prototype were simple, quick and easy interface fixes. However, my biggest concern after conducting my initial user testing surrounded the placement and naming of the My Bulletins section within the app’s information architecture. After discovering that it was not intuitive to users to see it in the Community tab, I knew this was a crucial piece to reevaluate in my next iteration.
Second Digital Iteration
A simple revision to the application’s information architecture was implemented in order to make the organization of contents more intuitive and in line with what I found users expected.
Here was my next prototype iteration that reflected this adjustment in information architecture:
Final High Fidelity Designs
Now with a few additional screens designed and changes implemented from my initial testing, I filled all the placeholder graphics and texts with contextual copy and content.
click to expand!UI Components
TEST & ITERATE
High-Fidelity Usability Testing & Iterating
In between my second digital iteration and my final high fidelity designs shown above, I had a third digital iteration prototype which I used to conduct usability testing with two participants. Both of my participants had experience working for small startup businesses, and therefore, were quite experienced and knowledgeable with testing a platform’s usability and providing detailed and high-level feedback.
With the goal of evaluating the design’s UI and interactions even deeper in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction, I asked my participants to complete a few tasks in the prototype while voicing their thoughts.
Cycle through the gallery below to see my design solutions to specific pieces of user testing feedback:
Interactive Prototype
Feel free to test out the final prototype here!or if you prefer...CONCLUSION
Reflecting on this project, I feel more attached to Kōkua than my other case studies because I’m very passionate about what it stands for. Having seen issues surrounding tourism and volunteering first hand, I firmly believe that the mobile app I’ve designed could be the beginnings of a real-world solution, or a seed for tangible impact.
Through this project, I’ve learned to balance user needs with business goals and most notably, ethical considerations. I’ve also gained a deeper understanding of how design can revolve around making connections between people, places, and cultures.
Looking ahead, I’m excited to take Kōkua further. As I grow as a designer, I plan to revisit this project with more experience so that I might have the tools to improve and expand on my design, and perhaps even turn it into a real product one day.