“How to Travel the World Without Leaving Home”

5 min readDec 5, 2019

Singapore ranked second place for working the longest hours (48) in the world¹. That means on an average 5 working days, Singaporean spend 9.6 hours working in a day.

On the other hand, according to Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation Report 2015, 70.8 % of the Singaporeans perceive themselves to be vacation-deprived². With Singapore being a workaholic country and exceed the recommended working hours (< 35 hours)³, how could we still cope between working and travel lifestyle at the same time?

Research Process

Interview

An 1–1 interview was conducted to understand better on a working adult.

There were a few key points that came up during the interview :

Work

Interviewee mentioned that work is stressful and due to work commitment, it is not possible to travel as often as possible. Although the interviewee had travelled twice (each trip having 2 weeks long), the interviewee felt that it wasn’t enough.

In additional, due to work commitment it is impossible to apply leaves longer than 2 weeks.

2. Cost

Japan is a popular destination for Singapore to travel. An average cost to travel to Japan for a week cost closed to $1,200⁴. Unfortunately, not everyone is fortunate enough to have that amount of money to travel.

Survey

A survey was conducted among 13 participants aged between 24–35. The highlight of the survey is shown below:

Out of the 13 participants:

Only 2 participants have the opportunities to travelled 3 times and more.

9 participants feel that they are overwhelmed by school/workload. The same number agreed that higher school/workload meant higher level of stress.

The survey also conducted to asked participants if they love travelling and if they feel the number of travel trip is enough:

Although all of the participants love travelling, 76.9 % felt that the number of travel trip is not enough.

Japan being the top destination among the participants to travel, their reasons of not travelling is as of the following :

Money
Job Commitment
Time

Design Process (ideate)

So how to create travel experience relate to users ?

Ideas

There were a few ideas brought out which has been categorise under: Most rational, Most delightful, Darling and Long Shot.

Four Categories Method

Using the prioritisation Matrix

The decision of creating the idea is via Immersive video (also known as 360⁰ videos). While is rational to create the experience through videos and photos, it does not provide a higher user value as compared to videos and photos.

Mode for the idea creation

The mode for the creation would be an application. To cater Singaporean’s busy lifestyle, mobile devices are preferable choice as the user is able to it whenever and wherever they want.

Another major decision of creating an application is because mobile penetration rate has been increasing steadily between 2018 and 2019.

The figure of mobile penetration rate between May 2018 and May 2019⁵

While there is a slight decrease in mobile penetration rate in October 2018, it has been readily increase since December 2018 (148.8%) till May 2019 (154.1%).

Brand Identity

The identity of the application branding:

Traveller

We hope through this application, everyone or anyone can be a traveller travelling around the world.

Freedom

The creation of this application is through this experience, user is able to find a temporary way to escape from reality.

Happy

Through the use of application, we hope user could achieve travelling around the world which they are unable to do so due to constraints.

Moodboard

Colour Scheme

Solution

Solution sketch

Screen idea creation using Crazy 8s method

Choosing of final sketch

Prototype version 1

Prototype version 2

Prototype

UI Screen

User flow

User feedback

The prototype has been tested with 3 participants, few key feedback is mentioned below:

Video too dizzy
Participants are unsure of what to do from the application
Layout looks misaligned in different devices

The participants would also like to Virtual Reality to be implemented so as to provide an immersive travel experience.

Improvement for the Prototype

Provide beginner’s tutorials
As participants first download the application, it would be useful to provide a tutorial screen so to improve the learning curve of the process.
Style guide
Style guide would play a important role so as to cater to different mobile devices (with different dimension etc).

Possible Future

Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Integration
With the integration of VR & AR into the immersive video, user is able to look around , interact with the virtual world. In a Medium Post⁶ stated that Virtual Reality must be able to trick all senses like sight, touch etc. In another Medium Post⁷ mentioned that the natural interaction and movement help to give the illusion of being there.

Virtual Tourism
The aid of using Virtual Reality helps to provide each user with unique experience. An example will be stepping King Tut’s Tomb where it uses Virtual Reality technology to “access” King Tut’s Tomb⁸.