A Travel App for Local Experiences

Problem

Wanderlust - a strong desire to travel.

But what happens when the genuine, cultural, localized experiences are lost to the thoughtfully crafted, money-sucking tourist contraptions a city's tourism industry has contrived for you?

Our app targeted the people who felt exactly that - that their travels were no longer genuine, local, and unique. We took a more human approach to traveling and used an app, and network of people to offer real, local, unique experience through a city's locals.

My Role: Product/UX Designer

BNOTIONS Team: Product Manager, Visual Designer, UX/Product Designer, Strategy Analyst

Client Team: CEO, CTO, COO

Beginning with our usual deep dive, we found the client favouring the approach of being able to connect with real humans in the city. The concept of a 'go-to' or 'local' was established as someone who knew the city inside out, and would offer advice, tips, and experiences.

Goal: To connect travellers and locals through unique, local, and exclusive experiences.

The process was the one we usually took as a BNOTIONS team: deep dive, brainstorm, ideate, iterate. In this case study, I'll talk more about the product decisions I contributed to and how they were communicated in the experience of the app.

A major conversation amongst our team was this: are travellers driven by the things they'll do or the people they meet? Are you more likely to be attracted to an activity someone could take you on or offer, or would you be more compelled by the person and who they were?

The UX of the app was largely driven by this experience. I drafted the MVP experience in two manners to reflect these two ideas. Here's the first flow:

The final solution allowed you to instantly access and speak with a local in the area. It allowed us to please both types of users, that were driven either by the appeal of activity, exclusivity and thrill or the connection to a person directly.

Learnings

Simplify, simplify, simplify. An MVP should be the absolute bare minimum needed for your product to show its value. Reducing extra features that were entirely dependent on the app's success and user base was something I learnt to do on this project.

Communicating your ideas. This was my first client project at BNOTIONS. My first presentation with the client, I had no idea I would be the one walking them through my wireframes. Being able to provide sound justifications and reasoning to my decisions was more important than ever. However, I also learnt the importance and rewarding feeling of the 'aha' moment. It's the moment when you don't really need to explain what you've done, or how something works, and team of people or users just gets it. It's one of the most rewarding moments of being a designer.