Solo Sisters

A community-generated toolkit to foster connection, and support an international Sisterhood of solo female travelers.
Role
team
advisors
Timeline
Recognition
UX Researcher
Product Designer
Hillary Soletic
Eric Forman
Erica Hackman
Sept 2022-May 2023
London Design Awards: Gold: UX Design - Travel | Gold: UX Design - Culture
overview
Solo female travel is booming, but resources in the market space still do not reflect that. Working to create a more progressive and equitable travel industry, I explored how to connect and serve the vulnerable community of solo female travelers while still maintaining the magic of their experiences.

Watch my 6 minute presentation here!
Responsibilities
  • Research
  • Prepare, Recruit, & Conduct Interviews
  • Synthesis & Ideation
  • Content Design
  • Prototyping & User Testing
  • UI & Branding
Project summary

The problem

Beginner solo female travelers often lack confidence in their ability to take and enjoy a trip alone. They list concerns of safety, navigation, and social isolation as what’s holding them back.
With women traveling alone more than ever...

How might we help bolster solo female travelers' confidence by providing safety measures when alone in a new region?

The Solution: a Community-Generated Connection & Travel Toolkit App

Solo Sisters is centered on intersectional feminism, made for anyone who identifies as a woman, and provides the resources and knowledge to navigate the nuances of adventuring on your own. The platform is an international Sisterhood of solo female travelers, whether they’re out exploring the world or back at home.

access current trip plans

make well-informed decisions with Location-specific travel tips

Find Comfort in shared community

Meet Sisters nearby

learn about them and if it's a compatible match

gain trust in who you're meeting

see what they're looking to do on their trip

Engage with locals

The approach

design process

The cyclical design process started by discovering user needs, defining design goals, and designing the optimal solution to deploy for the greatest market impact.
design strategy

The Opportunity

Issues aside, solo female travel is absolutely booming––with such eye-catching statistics as these.

Speaking with women

Over the first few months of research, I interviewed 16 women––10 women who have traveler solo before, and 6 women who have never traveled solo before.

Competitive Landscape

While there wasn't a wide array of female-focused travel resources, I made a point to find products solo female travelers were using or would be of use to them.

Identifying Assumptions

Early on, I laid out all of the assumptions I had about this problem space; the subgroups being Social, Safety, and Choosing a Destination.
I then went on to plot my assumptions—the x axis ranging from “unknown” to “known”, and the y, being how low or high risk it is—is this an important assumption to test? Test the high risk, unknown ones.
design

Prototype 1: Connection

What makes one person want to meet another? To figure this out, I broke down the act of connecting into interests and personality.
synthesis

Prototype 1: learnings

Short-term travel = Interests > Personality
Long-term travel = Compatibility > Interests
Interests + Personality go hand-in-hand
Solo female travelers are goal-oriented

Plotting the user journey

Persona Spectrum

My second prototype took on the issue of safety. Safety suggestions in the form of location points, walking path and zones attempt to inform travelers of their surroundings.
design

Prototype 2: Safety

For the second prototype, I attempted to tackle the issue of safety. The second screen shows “Safety points” which are designated locations to find solace. I also explored the idea of providing travelers “Safe paths”, as well as more wider locations of “Safe Zones.”
synthesis

Prototype 2: learnings

This prototype went over really poorly. I ran up against questions of data and tech viability issues, but worse than that, I was butting heads with some ethical design issues that could result in racial bias, harassment, and surveillance.
design

IA & Wireframing

synthesis

Testing with users

The approach to testing was intentional with guidelines and questions intact; yet loose enough to garner unexpected feedback because it was not a task-oriented script.
design

Visual Identity

The finished visual identity was made to feel magical, yet approachable.
Learnings

main takeaways

1

2

3

Content Design is critical design
Relevancy of some content varies by region
Research should be diverse & multi-sensory

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