Case Study - How do you kick-start the creation of tourism infrastructure for a country?
Travel app and culture transformation
Design of a pre-journey visualization and planning app to enable travelers to plan their journey to Saudi Arabia.
Delivered Human Centered Design and Agile training to the client team and established a “Visitor Experience (VX) Innovation Lab” to function as the node for all tourism infrastructure development initiatives in KSA.
Overview
The Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH) were looking for a way to design innovative, user-centric solutions to support the newly-opened Saudi recreational tourism market.
But in 2019 KSA had very little by way of tourism infrastructure, and their e-visa program had only just launched during this project. In a culture marked by strict social hierarcy and formality in interactions, they needed to transform their approach to innovation and establish a culture of openness and collaboration, fast.
A single design-driven project would have limited impact, a larger organizational transformation was required, to create a nerve center for innovative initiatives around tourism. The central challenge was to create capability in the client team to steward future tourism infrastructure projects by using human centered design and Agile principles and methodologies.
My Role
UX Design
Design Research
Design Training
Design Strategy
Prototyping
Script Writing
Video Production
Team
Principal Designer - me
Junior Strategic Designer
Client team - business, marketing, tech, content
Development partner
Partner Organizations
Key Activities
Design research to identify opportunity
Design strategy for product-market fit
IA, UX, UI design and usability testing
Human Centered Design and Agile Training of client team
Facilitating organizational partnerships
Approach
Visitor Experience Journeys Lab
Over 7 weeks, a client team drawn from across functions and levels was given training in human centered design thinking and Agile workflows through the creation of a VX Innovation Lab.
Enablement of client teams through HCD+Agile training.
App design - collaboratively designing the solution with the client team and key partner organisations.
Next-gen ways of working - helping transform and establish dynamic partnerships and thought leadership through collaborative problem-solving workshops.
Agile Training
Agile methodologies were adopted for project management. This included daily standups, backlog prioritization, sprint reviews and retrospectives.
Human-Centered Design Training
The client team was trained in HCD methods, from the foundational concepts of the double diamond design process to user research, mapping user journeys, identifying and prioritizing ideas, as well as the design of a prototype.
Co-Design of a Travel App
To train the client team and build in-house capabilities in user-centricity, we defined an opportunity space and then designed a travel planner app. The client team was involved in all aspects of design as on-the-job training.
Snapshots - Training
The Visitor Experience (VX) Innovation Lab was created to train a cross-functional team from the client organization in HCD and Agile methodologies - through the process of designing a travel planning app for visitors to plan their journey to Saudi.
Ethnographic Research
Lectures on theory followed by having the client team do the research planning and then conducting ethnographic research interviews themselves.
The team learned research techniques like shadowing, fly-on-the-wall, in-depth-interviews and others. They learned to understand users, empathize with their context, and develop insights into their needs.
Journey Mapping, Personas, Synthesis
The team learned how to create journey maps, and then to build detail into them for different personas. This was a primer in user-centric thinking for the team, and demonstrated how empathy can be used to identify core problems.
Following this, the team worked on Synthesis of the findings, and learned to use frameworks like affinity mapping, DVF prioritization and others.
Ideation Workshops
Ideation workshops were conducted every week with client and partner stakeholders. This was the first time most of these stakeholders were participating in collaborative problem-solving and design.
The design workshops were hugely successful in generating interest amongst partner organizations in working with the client org on future tourism projects.
UX and Prototype Design
The team actively participated in Wireframing, creating Low-fidelity paper prototypes, and learnt techniques like card sorting for content classification to arrive at the desired Information Architecture for the app.
We also scripted and produced a demo video of the app for various internal and external stakeholders.
Snapshots - Design
Key features & functionalities of a journey planner App that allows tourists to:
Visualize Saudi Arabia
Plan their journey
Access curated plans and personalized content
Obtain reliable information
Connect with locals
Book transport and stays
Visualisation
Rich imagery of Saudi Arabia is used throughout the application to be more engaging and help people visualize Saudi and its people.
Immersive media such as 3D photos, panoramas and video enhance the immersion and richness of the experience.
The Map view enables tourists to learn more about what’s in their area when they are on the ground.
Integration
The app is integrated with other service providers, including:
The e-visa authority
Tour operators
Transport services, such as Careem
Restaurants
Hotels and Homestays
This ensures a seamless experience for tourists, and the data is used to personalize the offerings.
Intelligent Assistant features were designed into the solution, including
Location based notifications
Trip Calendar-triggered reminders
“Plan-B” suggestions in case of unforeseen events
Tailored service offerings for different customer segments
From design prototype to launch
Onboarding screens
Planning - individual and collaborative
Screens from the live App
Impact
Capability upliftment
The client team gained expertise in Human-Centered Design and Agile methodologies through hands-on training and toolkits.
Prototype
A video prototype and hi-fidelity mockups were delivered to allow SCTH to visualise what a potential solution could look like.
MVP Roadmap
An MVP roadmap was delivered which outlined the different features that would address users’ pain points, and the ideal delivery roadmap to bring it to realisation.
Ecosystem Transformation
The Journeys Lab was born - a radically different and effective way of problem solving; it gained support from senior stakeholders who shared the concept with peers, stimulating an ecosystem transformation.
