Within our team, research took place at backpacker hostels and on the streets in Barcelona. Two separate locations were chosen for research and my partner and I’s locations can be seen on the map shown.
From our interviews with 25 backpackers, we culminated research findings and put together commonly occurring results to identify trends.
Lonely Planet, founded in the 1970s, is one of the best-known travel guides of our time. However, since the move into a digital world over the past decade, Lonely Planet is in need of moving digital successfully in order to stay relevant.
The purpose of this project was to form an app concept to address this problem, founded on research and analysis of current and popular apps and trends.
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Project Length: 6 weeks
Winning Lonely Planet App concept.
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INSIGHTS
The interviews provided the insight of the Lonely Planet Chat's USPs (Unique Selling Points):
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1
People feel lonely when traveling
2
Challenges they face are finding cheap food and drink
3
Backpackers highly value recommendations by word of mouth on local sites.
4
Backpackers highly value offline features
Representations of target audiences were then created in the form of personas.
Our personas addressed three different categories, the budget backpacker, mid-range backpacker and less frequent traveler or flatpacker. With the budget backpacker being our main target audience.
The Ecosystem Analysis shows the overall system of all the brand's touchpoints. These are divided into physical, books and magazines, and digital touchpoints, social media, mobile apps, web and ebooks.
As stated previously, Lonely Planet aims to step into the digital world of 2017. In order to successfully do this, we needed to look at the most successful apps and travel guides currently.
From the pain points identified through user interviews, the concept decided was an app which allows backpackers to communicate with fellow travelers on their journeys. This app will help ease loneliness and will allow for person to person tips, which most backpackers stated they highly value.
The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was determined by identifying the features that are essential to the product and would, therefore, feature in the first release.
The sitemap clearly displays each individual page of the app and the connection between each page.
The next aspect to determine was the users flow between each function on the app.
Prototyping was carried out using Sketch and linking it with Invision to test with potential users.
The purpose of wireframing is that the structure, or architecture as it is commonly referred to, can be seen clearly, tested and re-positioned with ease.
Branding, colours and finer details were then added. The product can also be interacted with here.
