WanderNest

It puts local guides and expat meetups in 1 app, with an AI helper called Birdie for the questions in between.

I did the research and the design on my own, with a mentor and group critiques along the way. Then I tested the prototype with 6 people and fixed the places they got stuck.

“I kept getting lots of conflicting information and was very confused,” one of them told me. The answers were out there, scattered across forums and Facebook groups, and they didn’t always agree.

I also went through WorkAway, Nomads.com, Facebook Groups, Reddit, Airbnb and BeaGo. Each one covers a slice of expat life well, and you’re left to stitch the slices together yourself.

Another person said, “Most groups I found were outdated or inactive.” And someone else: “It felt great to share findings and know I wasn’t alone.”

So WanderNest opens on both halves. The home screen has the resource hub and the meetups near you, and every group shows how many people are in it and what they posted last.

Birdie suggests questions to start with and keeps the text box at the bottom, where your thumb expects it. I built 6 flows to test, like asking Birdie how recycling works in Bangkok and comparing Bangkok with another city.

Every screen went from a paper sketch to a grey wireframe before it got any colour.

6 of 6 testers completed every task. The notes from those sessions set the next round of changes.

Testers wanted to tick several interests at once and see how far along they were, so onboarding stopped jumping ahead after each tap and got a progress bar. On the Bangkok screen they went looking for jobs, so I added the most popular job sites in Bangkok.