INTERACTIVE CONTENT & BOOKING PLATFORM

Introducing interactive tour guides to experience the diverse breadth of things to do. With unique personalised digital journeys — featuring you.

Great Britain — a destination, all-year-round, for travellers from around the world. Well-travelled characters explore popular destinations and interests to create immersive content. Starting with cinematic HD full-screen video, destinations are navigated by mobile device gyroscope, similar to a compass, changing scenes to view each tour guide.

Trip plans are curated along the way, from real-life stories matched to your interactions. Showing users around, in style, like a local. A preview of the wide range of experiences we curated, based on traveller themes to give users a start to their trip.

CHALLENGES

WIDE-RANGE OF TRAVEL BEHAVIOURS AND DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT

To accommodate many users, we profiled diverse travellers in the US, Germany and France, collaborating with local tourism stakeholders and analytics to synthesise behaviours and opportunities for interactions on multiple devices and platforms.

TRAVELLER HAVE DIFFERENT NEEDS AND PLANNING IS NON-LINEAR

We identified that travellers connect with personal recommendations that evoke thinking of an event, destination or sense of wonder. Flexible digital experiences meant mapping out travellers user journey to understand the range of decisive moments, from perceptions — to planning, hotel, flights, location and interests across Great Britain’s diverse landscape. Linking these moments to content experiences and locations to create an array of stories and itineraries.

CONTENT THAT EVOLVES WITH YOU, IS BOOKABLE AND WORTH SHARING

Sign-up and login is beneficial for the user — with the vast amount of seasonal experiences and things to do, we matched stories to hypothetical and real, relatable people. Creating real-life scenarios allowed us to capture information and match profiles to insights from travel conversations and trip planning with a recommendation algorithm. Breathing life to a usable digital experience with content and planning check-in points.

UX & DESIGN

SOLUTION

ONE STEP CLOSER TO IMAGINING YOUR GREAT BRITAIN

To bring travellers vacation in-reach, we collaborated with a range of content creators, to add various personalities. Building interest — from energetic short breaks to buzzing cultural cities, packed with adventure, art and nightlife. On the other extreme, extended summer vacations, journeying through the countryside via road trip or train, hiking breath-taking landscapes, vast with heritage or wine and food tours.

CURATED STORIES, FROM TOUR GUIDE TO PLANNING

For a seamless digital experience these content stories where then mapped to an information architecture. Establishing how we could customise the trip planning and booking for each traveller. With each interaction, we gave travellers choices, from choosing an experience to a location. Evoking their imagination and presenting them with some trip planning to consider — such as, how long would I want to go for, what else might I want to experience, where would I want to stay. Guiding travellers to navigate planning a trip, with the right information. As travellers formulated a plan by exploring and adding activities, we understood a better idea of their travel behaviour. Which allowed us to add features, such as ease of transport, with MapBox, linked to Google Maps and ticketing vendors. With every interaction and trip plan, we let travellers information be the curator, from 'top things to do' to 'customisable itineraries' for activities and locations.

DESIGN

PROCESS

The project required working with global stakeholders, across time-zones and on site. Leading off-shore design with development teams to implement the project. Through the project lifecycle, design, developers, content and stakeholders worked closely to keep the learning from the personalised platform determine iterative improvements and technical possibilities for a continuous feature release. User testing was done early on in the ideation phase, with quarterly feature hypothesis implemented in parallel with the previous quarters' development.

Our main content partner, 180LA & Unit 9, built our interactive tour guide microsite and from the outset, we worked closely to integrate content with our booking platform. Early on in the process, travel journeys and personas were shared. We then connected our hypothetical character stories and interests to our content and product feeds. Mapping tags for every event, activity, location, dates, interest and travel styles. A modular design toolkit was created to make navigating through a large amount of content easier. Emphasising themes with a logical UI toolkit —colour palettes, icons and typographic hierarchy across components. To make the platform accommodate for dynamic content and all-around visitors, we had to determine popular feature components with content and tools that could be targeted towards travellers deeper into the planning journey.

PROJECT

LEARNINGS

The key outtakes from this project are the importance of long-term product vision with adaptability to add new features and connected custom micro-site experiences. While we learnt that the travel planning journey is different for everyone — some booking flights early on and then continuing planning, others have a full package in mind or change plans according to spontaneity and on arrival. Often on a global platform, we do continuous usability and desirability testing, however for innovation, we learnt it is important to have a good understanding of an end-to-end journey and let continuous user learning improve features towards that vision. Steps taken towards that was a modular and adaptable design, as well as testing micro experiences of the platform on existing pages and features of the platform prior and post MVP. Working with SEO on curated destination information and interest pages early on allowed for some important insights.