Your challenge is to design a third-party tablet app that serves as an editorial experience and travel guide based on a tourists’ current location, or future destination; no matter the airline. Use technology in a future-forward way, to personalize the in-flight entertainment time for the guest.
Overtourism – the influx of tourists to the extent that locals are negatively impacted – is contributing to tension between visitors/locals as well as degradation of these spaces. In turn, tourists are seldom aware of how common tourism practices harm the locations they visit.
While the assignment was to essentially create an in-flight digital travel brochure, we decided to dig deeper and explore how we might also use this as a medium to combat overtourism.
Bettourist is a tablet app that not only helps users plan a vacation, but also provides tips on how to be a better tourist. This virtual, interactive travel brochure is designed to integrate into in-flight entertainment.
Since this product was contrived during a designathon, we needed to choose a particular direction. After some quick brainstorming sessions on Figjam, we came up with an abundance of ideas. Through discussion, we narrowed down to a few focal areas. However, further research was necessary to improve our understanding of the problem space.
We conducted interviews in advance to get a better understanding of what wants/needs travelers had when planning a trip.
Specifically, we wanted to find out what information travelers search for while planning their visit to an unfamiliar destination. We found that:
From reading the news and online discussions, we found that:
This part of the process was integral to us deciding to focus on overtourism as an issue.
We used empathy mapping to organize our research and general understanding of the user – a tourist planning their trip.
We distilled our ideas into this basic structure. This helped us clearly keep in mind what we needed to design for.
We did a round of rapid ideation (crazy 8's) to generate some low-fidelity wireframes. We voted on which ideas we liked best and wanted to prioritize most during the design process.
While building our mid-fi wireframes in Figma, we came up with various screen layout ideas.
After discussion, we narrowed down our options and picked out key frames (shown below).
While my partner and I made initial decisions together (moodboard, color choice, etc.) I took more responsibility for the overall branding and UI design.
A contraction of "better" and "tourist," the name "Bettourist" encompasses the product's purpose to help travelers be better tourists.
We looked for inspiration on sites like Dribbble and Behance and compiled examples of designs we liked.
This process helped us agree on a common direction to go when picking colors, fonts, and other elements contributing to UI design.
For primary colors we chose bright, contrasting colors to carry over the excitement of travel. The teal accent color was chosen to emulate the color of the ocean (a common theme in travel).
The secondary colors were chosen for specific decorative functions: the pastel red/yellow/green serve as indicators, the light grey is used for backgrounds and inactive states, and the dark grey is used for secondary text.
We used sans-serif fonts Poppins and Avenir in varying weights to signal that our app was modern, trendy, and exciting to use.
Keeping time constraints in mind, we opted for a simple yet iconic mascot design, which I created in Procreate. The anthropomorphic compass was designed to be the friendly face of Bettourist. Given more time, this character would have been incorporated as the "voice" of Bettourist.
We wanted the onboarding experience to feel immersive and exciting, so we varied the transitions at appropriate breaks between different flows and screens.
A standard search, but enhanced with tips on how to be more ethical and sustainable. More ethical alternatives are made easy to discover.
Bookmarks can be exported so users can retain them after the flight.
Beyond serving as a travel guide, we wanted to alleviate the issue of overtourism. This was tackled via intentionally nudging the user toward discovery of sustainable/ethical options and integrating tips to be a better tourist (aka a “Bettourist”) at various moments in the user flow.
Bettourist was an interesting solution to imagine – nudging users toward more ethical tourism practices through the medium of a digital travel brochure. Straying from the initial prompt, this project was an unexpected exercise in using UX design to initiate broad, meaningful change.
