Alert Traveler

Mobile Application

Terra Dotta is an ed-tech company based in Chapel Hill, NC. Started in 2001 by two professors at UNC, Terra Dotta has grown to be a trusted leader in higher education travel, providing study abroad and international program management solutions. Their enterprise SaaS solutions are leading the charge in the globalization of higher education. In 2021, they sought to rebuild Alert Traveler, their cross-platform mobile travel safety application.

1. Discover.

After landing Terra Dotta as a client for the agency I was with at the time, I led the client and my team through an in-depth discovery process to understand the end-users of the app and the decision-makers at higher ed institutions. Alert Travel itself is robust, so breaking down the app into its parts was essential.

2. Define.

With a comprehensive understanding of the product and the technical architecture, I lead my team in defining the user journey, user flows, and information architecture before design. With this in mind, we were able to marry the improvements to user stories for current functionality documented during Discovery and net new features I integrated into the user flows.

3. Design.

At the start of our UX design, I worked with my team to conduct a UX heuristic evaluation. From there, we used Miro to quickly wireframe a new UX. We then moved over to Figma for higher fidelity wireframes—a complete overhaul of Alert Traveler. We designed a modern, more straightforward UI that was clean. It would speak to Terra Dotta as a client, their customers, and higher ed students, their end-user. We developed a UI that worked for all three very distinct audiences.

4. Deliver

Upon design approval, I provided design oversight and guidance to our domestic and offshore development team. In redesigning the app, we also worked to rebuild the four-year-old app, migrating it from an old version of Angular to React Native. By modernizing their framework and eliminating technical debt, Terra Dotta received an iOS and Android app that they could easily maintain, quickly improve over time, and scale to their 700+ clients, thousands of users, and growing needs.

Results

The Alert Traveler app my team and I designed and rebuilt is now on App Store and Google Play store and in the pockets of thousands of students worldwide, keeping them safe on their academic adventures.