Quick Summary:

The project was a part of our 9 weeks long course module on User Experience Design and Content Strategy with our faculty Ms Irene Prereyra (Co-Founder of Anton & Irene, a Brooklyn based Design Studio). We were given a brief by Ms Irene who also acted as a Lonely Planet Stakeholder to take us through all the exercise required to get into the User Experience Design.

We were a team of 3 students (Me, Pedro Bare and Annabelle Frohn) and, as a part of the project my tasks were mainly focused on Eco System Analysis, Information Architecture, Features and Functionality Matrix as well as some parts of wireframing.

The Brief

So, in the beginning of the second week of the class, we were given a brief about ‘ Lonely Planet — The Travel Guide Platform’ which was mainly focused on the task, the target audience and the user pain points. And, to take us through the process, she asked us to do Ecosystem Analysis, User Research, Ideation and Concepting, Competitive Analysis, Features and Functionality Matrix, Site Map, User Flows and Wireframes.

The Design Challenge

The challenge was to come up with a digital solution which can be a companion to the Lonely Planet Books and the website and that can help travellers to find accommodation, restaurants, local sites etc or if we find any other user pain points during our user interviews, our solution can be based on that too.

Ecosystem Analysis

To start off with our project, we started with Lonely Planet Ecosystem Analysis. We wanted to identify that how Lonely Planet products are used by the users in which phase of travelling.

So, we listed out 6 different “WH” questions (Who, Why, What, Where, How and When) and prioritised them by taking hybrid approach of User Centred Design Model as well as Genius Model.

As we started out with ‘who’, from the brief we identified that Lonely Planet Content is mainly distributed into 2 types of target audience:

1. The Backpackers who are around 18–24 years old, travelling on a very low budget for longer than 3 months with their friends and having a smart phone as their single digital form factor most of the time.

2. The Flatpackers who are approximately 24–35 years old, travelling on a medium budget for less than a month alone having multiple digital factors with them like a smart phone, an iPad and a kindle.

As I mentioned above, we started designing our ecosystem by keeping users at the centre who are travellers in this case and we thought of some of the reason of why they travel and put it around the circle of ‘who’. Later, we thought of that what do they do while they’re travelling (particularly for this ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions, we used Genius Model where we trusted on our intuitions for the reasons of travelling and the activities these travellers do during their three different phases of travel.) Later, we looked for the platforms on which Lonely Planet is available to find out where do they find some helpful information which can support their task they’ll be performing. And then based on the brief, we identified that on how they find information on the devices they have as their companion and we merged all of them with our phases of travel which we marked as when.

Mapping the Lonely Planet Ecosystem

Lonely Planet Eco System Analysis

From this analysis, we found out the key insight that, there are many resources of Lonely Planet are used during the before and after travel phase but, there are very less resources are used in the during phase.

User Research

To get some valuable user research insights, we started out talking to the actual travellers who were a genuine fit for our target audience. We went to different hostels in Barcelona and did our qualitative research by asking 12 different travellers, some open ended questions like

Why they are travelling? What kind of activities they do while they’re travelling and how do they make decisions for that? What kind of obstacles they faced during travelling and how did they navigate through it to overcome?

and a few more general questions…

After completing the interview, we found out that majority of those travels particularly the backpackers finds issues while they’re planning their trip. They told us that they need to go through a lot of different blogs through different websites to plan our journey and also, they don’t trust any random travel blogger. Most of them follow a popular travel blogger or relies on the recommendations of their friends and they generally don’t like to read the entire blog because they have to read many blogs to plan their travel.

Summary of User Interviews

The Idea! 💡

And, this was the point when the idea got clicked to us! We already had looked Lonely Planet Resources during our ecosystem analysis and particularly the Trips app by Lonely Planet where you get different stories written by the different travellers in the form of blogs through which you can look for the destinations they’ve already been. But, majority of those blogs are randomly written and showed on the feed with ‘Staff Picked’. Also, those blogs are pretty long. So we decided that what if we redesign this app with the content that is actually useful for the travellers instead of taking them through the entire blog every time.