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Capsule, a city explorer app



Highlight contributions

Product design, Concept iteration, Persona creation, Wireframes and journey flows, Communication with stakeholders (User research, Archive Content team, Social, CEO), Empurical on-site testing, UR Management, Prototypes: desktop, mobile, OTT, wearables.

My Role

Sr. Product / UX Designer



Why?

There’s no shortage of mobile devices for learning about places to go and how to get there. But what about putting together a whole plan for the day? Cutting, pasting, mapping, estimating travel-time, and coming up with what to do, in the right order is transformed by Capsule. 

Capsule is an app that works like Google Maps, but without the Googling. It works like Yelp but without the tedious research. Capsule optimizes a few hours of fun in urban locations around the world from a curated and clued-in set of activities nearby one another. All Plan, No Planning.







Goals

My goal for this project was to assist in empurical research (putting together the fun stuff happening around town) as well as helping the team with building a clean, intuitive user design for an MVP. This was super fun process to take on parts of Los Angeles (I was assigned to Chinatown, because I have had an art studio there for many years) and put together a skeletal concept for a great evening. This included my favorite dim sum spot, a local favorite bakey, a record shop, a rare bookstore, a Museum of Velvet Paintings (what?), and of course, a great cocktail spot in a historic bar to top it off. We then turned our diaries from real-life journeys into personas, journey flows, and prototypes to present to first-seed investors. 



Research, Testing

In order to actually get our heads around what 2-6 hours in a cool part of our city would look like, we hit the pavement. We walked around and kept a diary where we noted where we would show some around, the ideal order, the open hours of businesses, splashed in a good number of free sights, and made sure the food and drink was somewhere date-able. Was it walkable? Was it accessible? How long would you basically spend here? When did we get hungry? Most importantly, was it interesting and beyond what you would stumble on researching for an hour online?


Within three months we were able to turn these around for unmoderated concept testing on usertesting.com



Adapting to findings

Immediately we realized we needed  to onboard users with a clear communication that they would need to for the most part, surrender a trend in digital products which presses for constant customization. Capsule was actually saying no the limitless options of the Internet and asking for some trust when it came to putting together a good time. We realized we were stumbling on something like, a very abstract, AI party planner, that could adapt to urban contexts.

We also realized we wanted to break down the capsules into luxe and medium in terms of spending. We received enough participant response to convey that sometimes, people were up to treat themselves and sometimes they weren’t. This was going to be a major decision factor for choosing a particular capsule.

Through our exploratory concept research with participants we also came to appropriately emphasize the sharing and social aspect of this app. The primary experience of the capsule experience was buttressed with the ability to share it out to friends for either joining or recommending. We were also able to identify this as a potential paid advertisement area for outlining in our MVP.