Enabling anyone with a smartphone to create and share digital audio walks
The Problem
The options to explore places of interest have severe limitations
People love to explore. Global tourism continues to grow year on year, with billions spent visiting places of interest. But for all of the time, effort and money spent visiting these locations, what do people really know about them?
Current options, including guidebooks and walking tours, have severe limitations, being inflexible, antisocial and unhygienic. YourTour believes that every place has a story to tell and someone to tell it. The problem, is how?
Company
YourTour
Role
Product design
User research
Tools
Figma
InVision
Axure
The Goal
Delivering an MVP that validates the proposition
YourTour wants to enable anyone with a smartphone to create and consume digital audio tours. Armed with nothing more than an idea and heaps of enthusiasm, the goal was to deliver an MVP that validates the proposition.
A small team of 4 was assembled, including me, the product designer, 2 developers and the original founder. The aim was to deliver the MVP within 6 months.
The Approach
Getting out of the building to understand the problem
The first thing I needed to do was go and speak to potential users. Along with the Founder, we spent a few days targeting key locations around London to speak to people about their travel experiences.
Alongside this, I interviewed dozens of local tour guides around London and the South East, understanding the limitations of their day-to-day work, and how a digital product might be of value.
Prototyping and testing with real users from the start
Because of the complexity of what we were trying to achieve, it was paramount that we involved users from day one. Starting with the creation side of the product, I began building and testing prototypes in InVision with local tour guides. This was critical to understanding the structure of tour creation, and how we were going to digitize this process.
This also gave us a great starting point for how the consumption side of the product would take shape, and how the content being created could best be explored by travellers.
The Solution
Assemble a tour in minutes
From photo-taking to scriptwriting to voice recording, the design of the YourTour Creator App utilises the diverse features of the smartphone to make content-rich storytelling quick and easy.
In order to maintain a consistent level of quality in each tour, task feedback is present throughout the app, so the creator can keep up to date with the progress of their tour building.
Compelling stories of fascinating places
On the consumer side of the platform, the YourTour Explorer App, a clean but playful interface provides a canvas for the rich storytelling to come to life. Users can explore at their own pace, in their own time, and synced via Bluetooth for a shared experience.
