Project idea: a marketplace for tourists and guides. Guides provide excursions, tourists buy excursions.

Goal: launching MVP and launching and raising funds for a company on crowdfunding.

My role: Business Analyst, Design Sprint Moderator, Branding Sprint Moderator, UX designer, User Researcher, Visual Designer.

Results: Created MVP app, which according to user testing solves their pain points. Created the website for the crowdfunding campaign, which started to raise money.

Working steps: Competitors research, Design sprint (1st), User testing with tourists, Design sprint (2nd), User testing (customer experience), Branding sprint, Landing page design, User Journey Map, Creating the interface for tourists, Interface for guides, User testing with guides.

🤓 Competitors research

Сompetitors offer excursions and mostly they are not at all authentic. For example, it’s just resale of tickets from travel agencies, a sale of entrance tickets to parks, museums, attractions. Somewhere this is a private excursion only: a tourist and a guide, but often this is the resale of tickets for boring tours of top tourist locations.

📈 Market Validation

We found researches, that most tourists do not plan in advance what to do on the spot, they buy airline tickets, book hotel, but procrastinate entertainment.

Since the content is one of the most important in this application, it should be authentic and interesting. Therefore, we have implemented scheme recommendations of the excursions and on the basis of this have come up with a business model.

Business model

👟 The first design sprint

We wanted to test our hypotheses, quickly develop a prototype of the product, find out what potential customers think, so we chose the methodology of Design sprints. I will not go into the details of the methodology. I will tell you more about our process. But if you do not know, you can find out a lot of interesting here or here.

🎯 Creating the goal

We started with an optimistic one: everyone expressed the global goal of our project.

Goal: To generate a new niche through which will pass 1% of all journeys in the world.

🧐 Sprint questions

Questions for the sprint are: How can we create a new market and become №1 on it? How can we be credible for users? How can we become more competitive than Airbnb?

🗺️ Map

Point of focus: Search and order activities for travelers.

The design sprint map

I drew the map, we thought through the full interaction of the product, starting from the moment when the user finds out about the project, and how the user can achieve the goal within the product.

Vertically, I placed predefined stages “Discovery, learning, using, the goal”. It really helped because it was difficult to start from scratch.

Horizontal I placed roles that we have in the project: tourist, guide, moderator, blogger. Our roles in the product corresponded to our business model with the changes that emerged during the discussion. We added a moderator of content and support.

🤔 HMW & Expert interviews

Organizing How Might We & Note n Vote

We also tried to look at the project from a different angle and take into account the negative consequences in order to avoid them. We posed uncomfortable questions: What can go wrong? Where is our weak point?

We invited all members of our team and people who are experts in their field to give their opinion. During the discussion and the expert interviews, more and more new questions appeared, which I, as a moderator, wrote down on post-it notes.

We recorded all potential problems with the product in the HMW format. I adore this method, thanks to the formulation, potential problems can look not intimidating, but like a task that can be solved.

HMW: To help recommend the app to friends? To track the activities of friends? To find out the user’s dream and offer him a service?

⚡ Lightning Demos

Lightning Demos post-it notes

We looked through other products in order to find what we can use in our product. We liked:

Gamification and customization of content on Netflix. (Push notifications on behalf of the character from TV series)

Airbnb Referral program.

How booking.com shows that your friends were at a nearby location

Spotify content customization (recommendations based on time of year, day, holidays).

📝 Sketches

One of the solutions sketches. Not a winning, another solution was selected.

Four-step sketch. We tried to generate as many ideas as possible.

I like Individual work in design sprints, each works separately. individual work gives everyone the opportunity to express their opinions. Unlike Brainstorm, where a couple of people usually speak, the rest are silent.

The most interesting exercise is crazy 8, wherein 8 minutes you need to come up with 8 variations for the best idea. Under conditions of forced stress, due to time constraints, the brain begins to work differently and unexpected interesting solutions arise from the subconscious.

At the end of the day, we received from each of the participants one solution sketch of the app with additional comments on how it should work.

🙋 Voting the concept

The next day started with a discussion of Solutions sketches and choosing the best by voting. We had several variants of the app concepts:

The user answers the questionnaire, selects from the examples of excursions that he likes, on the basis of this content is customized. The user can create and share photo collages from a new trip.

The user looks through excursions, finds like-minded people on a journey to carry out a challenge together.

The user looks through excursions on the map or swipes cards like in tinder, reads the description, orders excursion, the guide arrives like a taxi driver in Uber.

Won the last variant with the details from the first.

🎞️ Storyboard

Storyboarding: I did not draw on the board, for me was more convenient to use huge paper at the table.

The second part of the day was devoted to creating the storyboard, on the basis of which prototype will be created and tested with users. Awesome tip from the A&J Smart to facilitate creating.

✨ Prototyping

Prototype sources in Sketch

The fourth day of the design sprint was devoted to the creation of the prototype. We had to do quite a voluminous interactive prototype that involves the full path of the product and user interaction (based on design sprint map), starting with the first stage — advertising on Instagram.

While I was designing the prototype in Sketch + InvisionApp, my colleagues helped me with providing content: nice texts were written for the landing page. I managed to make several versions of prototypes in order to test different hypotheses.

🔎 User testing

My questions, which I prepared for interviews

To find respondents for the user testing I used Facebook ads. I tried 2 ad companies: with the goal to fill in the questionnaire and to write directly in Facebook Messenger, but successful appears only the questionnaire ad.

The screening of respondents was carried out using the Google Forms questionnaire. I eliminated the respondents with a special question, where it was necessary to choose the correct answer (interest: travel), those who chose — pass to the next questions and I invited respondents to the user testing.

I sent invitations with a personalized email to everyone, those who agreed were recorded in the calendar Calendly.

One of the respondents, which participated in the remote user testing :)

For video calls, I used Google Hangouts, for video recording Quick Time Player, for the prototype — InvisionApp.

1.5 hours were allocated to each respondent. All respondents were very cool, they travel a lot, and they were from our target audience. At first, I asked general questions, then we proceed to questions related to the topic, finally, I showed the prototype, asked to complete the tasks, observed the responses and mood. I recorded testing on the video, for the purpose to review and analyze.

💬 What our users said

I like “Yonder” because it seems like “Wonder”. If the guide doesn’t answer me more than 3 hours I will do different experience. I don’t like ordinal excursions, because you get very serious with group of retired people. It looks intrusive, because all what app did: asked a couple of questions and show me advertisement. I don’t want to see one offer in the page. I want to see offers in the context.

An important result of the testing was that users liked the product, it even solves their pain points, which they had expressed during the user testing. Our hypothesis that users do not book in advance the excursions was confirmed, and also that speed and unique customized content is important to them.

We showed several versions of the application interface in the form of cards (like in a tinder) and in the form of a map. We made bets that the cards option would be preferable, but surprisingly most users did not understand it or did not like it, so we decided to continue on with the interface, where activities are shown on the map.

👟 Second design sprint

The second design sprint was conducted by the abridged version and was completely devoted to the customer experience, interacting with the product offline. We conducted another user testing in order to find out how they interact with the application offline, in unforeseen, controversial situations.

For example, we specifically made mistakes in the prototype and observed how users will solve them. We Figured out whether the support of the app is clear, and how we can design the most effective customer care, we also corrected some obscure points, that were in the previous prototype and tested it with users. We made a more detailed description of the excursion page.

According to the second user testing results, we found that:

Users do not want to be involved in activities where physical work is required.

Not everyone was easy to contact the guide or support.

Users don’t want to read a lot of text after booking.

💎 Branding sprint

Along with the work on the application, our team decided to launch a crowdfunding company and for this, a website was required, that will tell about our startup and application. In order to convey the values of our brand to consumers, we conducted a short branding sprint also authored by Jake Knapp.

Our universal value is a touch of dreamed travel-lifestyle. In most services, there is a big gap between how they position themselves and what value they actually carry for users. We wanted to avoid this gap in our product.

Once again reminded for whom we make the product:

Positioning relative to competitors:

Personality Sliders:

Colour. When choosing colors, we relied on the psychology of color, user research, and the analysis of competitors.

Color schemes of competitors.

🔗 Landing page

First, we held a meeting and outlined the structure of the landing page, then I translated it into wireframes.

Process. The search for visual form.

The final version of the design.

Landing page for travelers.

Landing page for travelers. There were a lot of amendments from the marketing side, mostly the texts and the placement of the blocks were changed. It was difficult to balance between making a modern design, marketing requirements (how not to go over the edge of obsession) and how to convey our brand values.

Landing page for bloggers.

Landing page for bloggers. The page narrates about the advantages of the affiliate program and how you can earn money by recommending a guide/activity. Purpose of the page: sending an application via the contact form. There are a lot of fields: it is necessary to specify the blogger’s contacts, information about the guide and activities, add photo/video tour if possible.

Therefore, in order to facilitate the process, I divided the form into several steps. Also, the team was against pink color used as the background, because it is hard to read therefore will kill the conversion, so I invented smoothly change pink color to white on scrolling.

Also, to attract attention to our product was designed blog:

🗺️ Customer Journey Map

I relied on the map of the design of the sprint. The map was transferred to real-time board and become more detailed.

The application has interfaces for tourists and guides. Let’s start with the interface for tourists.

🏝️ Designing interface for tourists

After conducting user testing, I made the report. New interface software requirements specifications were created. As I have already said, the user interface with the map was understandable and preferable for users, then the interface with cards, so we decided to continue on with this. Especially since such an interface is more suitable for our brand’s values — an instant booking during the journey.

Since I did prototypes in sketch + invisionApp, it was easier for me to start with visual design, I just overlapped wireframes.

Excursions search page.

Tour description page. The feature “Counter of friends who were here” was transferred from the design sprint sketch to the release.