Case Study: Enjoy your VACCAYtion without crowd
By: Nawamon Chanprapun
Tags: Ux Case Study, Thailand, UX Design, UI, UX

This is my second case study article. This time I’m working on an application project for the Innovative Tourism Project Pitching 2021 , Type 2: Digital Technology Innovation. I did the project with my college friends, Jeen and Plathong! The brief is to create an innovation that promote Thai local tourism businesses to consumers.

This project is supported by DASTA

At that time, we were still in a COVID-19 situation so we have to work together online. The tools that we mainly used are Google Slides, as a tool to brainstorm and do all the planning stuffs and Figma, as a design and prototype tool.

We started by listing all the tasks we have to do with fixed deadlines. We were working as an intern at day, so we only have time together at night. I think that we did well on time management, as we talked almost everyday for 1–2 hours, so it didn’t feel that exhausted and we still managed to finish everything in time. We also agreed on the goal of this project, which is to do a project for our portfolio not to win the prize.

DISCOVER

Problem Scope / HMW

First, we researched and brainstormed about Thai tourism and problems in order to know what we should focus on. Over-tourism was the one we were interested in the most since we thought about what tourism during post-COVID situation would look like, and believed that people would still be afraid of crowded places, so here’s our HMW:

How Might We Reduce Tourist Congestion and promote local businesses

We came up with an idea about tracking crowdedness of each locations, by using the same technology as Google Map’s, which can detect location data from users and display as traffic information. By knowing level of crowdedness in advance, users can avoid places full of people. We also wanted to promote local businesses, so we planned to include the “Rating and Review” feature as well.

Online Survey

We created an online survey to gather general information about tourists in Thailand. We asked them general demographic questions as well as questions about their trip. We also asked about how they search for information when travelling as well as other travel application they use.

Survey result

We didn’t conduct an interview session as planned due to some reasons, which I feel a bit regret. There’re lots of things that can be improved; for example, the question asking respondents to rate their feeling toward tourist congestion using number scale of 1–5 can be changed to asking them to describe their experience when encountering tourist congestions instead, as number scale does not really communicate feeling and different respondents may define each number differently.

In addition, the problems I always encounter when doing user research is that most of the respondents are people related to me in some way, like friends on my social media or people in the same community, so the information I got usually contain bias.

Survey Result

Anyway, we know that majority of respondents don’t like crowdedness and they would find somewhere else to go.

DEFINE

Persona — UX Storyboard

Persona

We created a persona based on information we got from the survey. We focused on the Generation Z which is the group that is familiar with technology the most.

UX Storyboard

Then we created a UX storyboard to show the scenario of user using our application. We moved to Figma at this step.

Lean UX Canvas — Competitor Analysis

Lean UX Canvas

As the contest seems to focus on business aspect more than UX/UI aspect, we thought that it might be great to do a lean UX canvas, as well as the competitor analysis. Some of the information in the canvas were refined and changed in later process.

Competitors Analysis

We analysed Top 3 most used application by respondents from our online survey and Google Map.

IDEATE

Sitemap

First, I have to admit that I misunderstood sitemap as user flow. What we did is actually a “Sitemap” which is the structure of all pages of the application.

Sitemap

Name & Tagline

It takes quite long time for us to come up with name and tagline. We have brainstormed lots of possible phrases and words. I really want the name and tagline to start with the same letter so that it will be easy to remember and sound cool, but we couldn’t think of it.

Name and tagline brainstorming

Finally we voted and here’s the name and tagline of our app:

VACCAY — Flee and free from crowd

Logo & Visual Direction

Here’s my favourite part! We searched for referenced visual direction and agreed that the UI would be clean interface with many beautiful photographs. We chose blue as main colour since it is colour of the sea which is one of Thailand’s popular natural landmark, and orange as secondary colour.