Balkan Quest
Role: Sole Designer
Timeline: 1-2 months
Tools used: Figma, After Effects
Platform: Android, IOS
Video Case Study:
If you are in a hurry, feel free to check out the video. It's a short version of how I designed Balkan Quest. I explain my design thinking process, what problems I faced, and how I solved them.
BUT
If you are not in a hurry, then I have a story to tell you about how I came up with the idea of Balkan Quest. I lived in the UK for the last seven years. Once in a while, I used to visit my home country, Bulgaria. As I was traveling from Sofia to Varna, I had to use the public transport, where I met a lovely Belgian lady. She shared some troubles she had while figuring out how to travel through the Balkans, since she had never visited Bulgaria before. At the time, I wasn't working in the UX design field, yet my mind didn't stop thinking about how to solve a problem like this. This is how, from this simple conversation, I got on a full-on quest, hence the name, to help travellers on their journies.
What is Balkan Quest?
Balkan Quest is a mobile app designed to bridge the gap for international tourists visiting the Balkan countries, offering popular destinations and a badge system to unlock hidden spots.
You can checkout the prototype below:
Prototype
Problem:
Traveling through the Balkans is rich in culture but difficult to navigate — especially if you don’t know which places to visit. Tourists often struggle to decide which landmarks to visit and lack motivation to explore beyond the most popular attractions. Existing apps focus on information rather than engagement or discovery.
Pain points
◉Transport infrastructure exists, but is often:
- Inconsistently translated
- Cash-based
◉Destination options:
- Limited destinations - bad marketing towards international tourism
- No motivation to visit other local destinations
◉Safety:
- Most Balkan countries are safe for travel, yet the language barrier is the most common issue people face.
Solution:
I designed a gamified travel app that rewards users with badges for visiting landmarks, encouraging exploration, and making travel more interactive and fun.
The app shows the top 5 destinations in a major Balkan city and their public transport lines. To enhance the user experience, there’s a gamefide function to earn a badge after visiting all five destinations in that city.
Research:
After the conversation with the lady on the bus, I started doing deeper research.
Here's what I found out:
I did 8-10 surveys with potential users. To do this, first, I joined a bunch of backpacking Facebook groups. Here are some of the results I got:
- Users want simple navigation
- Tourists enjoy tracking progress
- People like collecting achievements
Based on my interaction with the Belgian lady on the bus, I created a couple of personas and their needs.
Name: Ana, 27
solo traveller
Goal: Explore cities efficiently
Pain point: Doesn’t know where to start, feels overwhelmed
Name: Jim, 34
solo traveller
Goal: Solo hikes
Pain point: No information for routes, language barrier for public transport
Research insignhts
Through interviews with backpackers and cultural travelers: Transport systems weren’t necessarily complicated — users just feared miscommunication and uncertainty. 🟢 Gamification Increases Exploration When exploration felt like progress, users were more willing to take unfamiliar routes.
Fear > Complexity
UX Strategy shift
Instead of: Balkan Quest reframes the journey as: Discover → Navigate → Arrive → Earn → Explore More The focus becomes empowerment, not transaction.
Search → Book → Travel
GOALS:
MVP - 5 cities with their top 5 destinations Badge system reward Interactive map with locations
User needs:
Destinations to visit Updated public transport information for each destination based on the user's current location Collect memories
Constraints
No information about public transport Startup No API’s
Design process
I started with a simple grid to display the available cities. Later, after the first MVP was done, some testing was conducted. The design was lacking a lot of information. The goal was to use a few colors, with neon green to be the center aspect for buttons and important links. But even with this simplicity in mind, the important information wasn't well presented. After taking some notes, I redesigned the app so that users would get some basic info for each destination, and have a button for the badge they will earn if they visit set destination. Which in turn, increased the user's curiosity to see what will happen after they get the promised badge.
Usability Testing
While testing the app, we discovered we can add more features to enhance the user experience. Once the user finishes all 5 destinations in that one city, there’s a badge animation playing as a reward for their hard work. This can start a collection of badges, and we can add a user system with tiers based on how many badges they earn. The downside to this was that the user could only use the app in limited cities. Another technical issue we experienced was that the API system was nonexistent. So to fix this, we had to limit it to only showing possible lines of public transport with no live preview
Planned features
User-level system - traveller, explorer, etc., based on visited cities and badges earned Public transport live update - API system Progress bar on each city/destination Feature to unlock hidden gems - being able to buy that feature if not enough badges are earned
RESULTS
Conclusion
Designing Balkan Quest under startup constraints sharpened my ability to prioritize usability, reduce complexity, and build scalable foundations. This project reflects how I combine UX thinking with visual and motion design to create interfaces that are not only functional but memorable.
If I had more time, I would create a working API server to give accurate public transport updates for the users to use.