Waze
Create an App Feature
What is Waze?
Waze is a top-rated and downloaded crowd-sourced navigation app that has over 140 million users. When using Waze you can see details about a restaurant/store but there is no way to view reviews without leaving the app and potentially going to a competitor’s app.
Role: UX Researcher and UX/UI Designer
Target Audience: Users ages 16-80 who use Waze
Tools: Figma, Whimsical, Maze, Miro
Restrictions:
Project timeline was limited to 80 hours
I had to work within Waze’s design language and style guide.
Solutions:
Create an in-depth review system that includes filtering and sorting options
Blend the new feature and systems into Waze’s current design language
Expand Waze’s current social systems to allow users to leave recommendations for their friends
Research & Define
Research
Understand what users look for when looking at reviews/review systems as well as what a good social system looks like as a secondary function.
Research Goal:
Understand what makes a good review system
Learn how users discover new restaurants/stores/etc.
Understand what are some good social features to have in a social feed.
Research Objectives:
Review systems and social systems have shared features and ideologies
They both should be simple and easily understood on how they function
The key to both is being able to see who posted it, what did they post, and when did they post it
For a review system, there isn’t much variety in its layout
Social systems also share components of review system layouts
Having good filtering and sorting options are great for users to customize their feeds
Research Methodologies:
One-on-One Interviews
Each one of my participants used a different navigation app than the others
Two of them looked at reviews but to different degrees and the other didn’t care for them at all
Each participant noted that they did trust a family member/friend more than an online review.
One noted that they prefer to look at trusted food blogs over reviews but still look at them
One participant said that if they are out they will use Google Maps to see what is around and pay less attention to the reviews
Participants: 3
Ages: 25-36
Persona
Name: Sierra Parsons
Age: 25
Occupation: Project Lead
Location: Los Angeles, CA
She always uses navigation apps whether she knows where she is going or not
She likes to check multiple navigation apps for traffic along the way
She hangs out with her friends a few times a month
If she is planning the night out she will check reviews to make sure it is a quality place
I wanted to get an understanding of the flow of the app with the new review and social feature. The flow showcases a user navigating to both the review screen and the friends screen.
Task Flow
One-on-one Interviews
Secondary Research
Research Findings:
Mid-Fidelity Design & Testing
Mid-Fidelity Design
Started the design process with higher fidelity content to make sure content felt appropriate and worked with the existing content
Added the review and friends icon to the location detail screen to understand where they would fit (image group 1)
Designed the base screens for both the review and friends feeds
Wireframes
*image group 1 (Location detail screen variations)
*image group 2 (Review feed, recommendation feed)
*image group 3 (Recommendation creator, Review creator)
Used testing at this point to understand what variation users preferred for the location detail screen
I wasn’t looking for huge changes to make, just wanted to use this testing to get initial reactions to layouts
Mid-Fidelity Testing
Made the links to friends and review feed screens more apparent on the location detail screen
Changed “highly recommends"/recommends” text to look more like a badge
Made a change on the friends feed to make it more obvious to the user that they can scroll (change was also made to the review screen)
Mid-Fidelity Revisions
Original Friends Feed
Updated Friends Feed
Updated Location Detail Screen
Original Location Detail Screen
High-Fidelity Design & Testing
High-Fidelity Design
Updated the scroll indicator to fit more with Waze’s design language
Expanded the recommendation creator to include a way for users to add a review with their recommendation to their friends
Created filtering and sorting popups
Changes for the prototype
Date filter options tab
I wanted to get a decent amount of participants for this testing so that I hopefully get better results/feedback
Most of the feedback for changes was around the filtering/sorting tabs
High-Fidelity Testing
Original active sorting popup
Updated active sorting popup
Expanded recommendation creator
Updated friends feed with new scroll indicator
Active filter popup
Active sorting popup
Changed the way the sorting popup functioned
Reworded how the feed would be sorted to be clearer for the user to understand (“Date: Newest” changed to “Date: Newest first”
Changed how the filtering options popup looked when going into a specific filter type like the date
High-Fidelity Revisions
Original date filter options popup
Updated date filter options popup
In Conclusion…
I think this project provided a unique perspective since the idea on paper seemed simple while in actuality it is more in-depth. It was also a crucial project for me to understand since it provided me more experience working with an existing style guide and a company’s design language. Although Waze’s main focus is on navigation and crowd-sourced reporting I would love for them to explore ideas such as this one. It would provide them with an opportunity to increase users’ time within the application without having to go to a competitor for a feature.
If I were to continue iterating on this project I would love to build out a system tied to someone leaving a recommendation for their friend where they had to complete a trip to that location before they are prompted with the recommendation module.