Roam

Roam is a platform designed to help individuals easily and quickly get curated information on restaurants & fun things to do in a city that they have never been to or want to explore more based on friends and family interests. Roam will allow users to pin locations on a map to highlight some of their favorites spots in a particular city, and will also allow users to create, manage, organize and share those pins with their “followers”.

Design:
Developer:
Portfolio
Developer:
Portfolio
Developer:
-
Portfolio
Mentor:

Problem Space 

Problem Statement  

How can we make the process of finding restaurants, places to go, and things to do that our friends and family enjoy in a particular city that we haven’t been to or explored yet less overwhelming & more centralized?

Problem Background  

Traveling is natural for humans, we weren’t meant to be so sedentary. Whether it’s in state or internationally, there are many reasons why we like to travel. Being able to see the world gives you an escape, it can be relaxing, allows you to learn new things, see different cultures, explore and helps you build quality relationships with people. A lot of the time people don’t even want to travel because they don’t know where to go once they get there or wouldn’t know certain things exist. 

Finding places to eat and things to do can be easy but can be a bit overwhelming when you realize that you’ve been in a google rabbit hole for the past 3 hours. It can then be difficult trying to find specific things you’d enjoy doing and places you want to eat. What if we could remove those barriers and get people to explore & travel more by allowing them to see where their friends recommend going and what they like to eat because who do you trust more and have plenty in common with than your friends and family? Roam aims to remove that exact barrier to ease people on the fear or struggles of traveling.

Research Insights

User Pain Points

Using a combination of surveys and interviews, we were able to gather user insights in regards to their travel experiences. We were able to identify based on the conclusive feedback we received, that a lot of our target users shared the same pain points.

Supporting Data

100% of people we spoke to mentioned that they could easily find new places to go, restaurants to try and things to do but would quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of options and reviews they’d have to read through. Various mediums such as social media, blogs, and travel sites were all listed as viable options but deciding who to trust and what to go with was also a task in itself.

Feedback

Our research also confirmed that 100% of users liked being updated when theIr friends and family travel or try new things and would take their suggestions first over ones they read online. They liked to hear about their experiences to get inspiration, jot down their recommendations from their reviews and it gave them a general sense of happiness seeing their family and friends having fun and trying new things.

Landing on the Solution

Based on our target users’ pain points, we knew we wanted to work on an application that allows users to browse through activities and restaurants based on highlighted pins from  their “followers” through the following features…

  • Map highlighting pins of restaurants, places in a particular city with reviews from followers
  • Share & Save icons to showcase favorite spots in a city with other friends and save locations as if i was writing in my dairy
  • Show similar recommendations based on activities, restaurants my friends have engaged with

Future Steps

As my next steps I  hope to be working with a cross functional team which includes Engineers and UI/UX designers to develop the “hows” of my proposed solution. 

Presentation - https://www.loom.com/share/391c9ea9a2ac4f729c49e5f8fcede321 

Learnings

Product Manager Learnings:

Emmanuel Raji

Co.Lab was a very interesting experience for me getting to step into the shoes of a real PM. Some of the key learnings I took away from this sprint include:

  • As a PM, it's important to focus on the problem space, not the solution space. Defining an actual problem that is focused on one problem
  • Talking to customers through surveys and user interviews to validate your problem will be valuable in the market 
  • The importance and quantitative research that helps to tie back to both user and market research which ultimately help define the product’s success and guide its potential growth.

Designer Learnings:

Developer Learnings:

Developers Learnings:

&

Full Team Learning