City Activity Heatmap — rethinking the concept of travel guides (UX)
Travelling is awesome. Being single in my mid-twenties with a job that mostly requires a stable internet connection, allows me to occasionally board trains and planes and visit distant places I haven’t been to before.
Whenever I arrive at a new city I rather avoid the classic touristic hotspots and dive right into the scene. I want to find a good place to grab a coffee, eat something delicious, befriend some locals and learn about their lifes.
To me this approach is a lot more satisfying than checking off touristic attractions or taking a sightseeing tour atop an overcrowded bus.
I’m there to get enriching perspectives, authentic experiences, unexpected adventures - I want to see the cities I visit through the eyes of a resident. Call my travelling persona “The Visident”.
Why most travel guides don’t work for me.
The average travel guide (no matter if in print or as a web or mobile app) is bulky, has over fifteen categories and is focused around events and locations. This is great if you like to create one of those sightseeing checklists, but way to overblown for a spontaneous traveler looking for a rough direction to explore.
There has to be a better way to create and consume travel guides for all the “Visidents” out there.
Yesterday I was preparing a welcome mail for two of our ChatGrape Rockstars. Karim from Beirut and Orhan from Germany are both visiting us in Vienna this summer and as I was writing up general infos about the office and their apartments I had an idea for a new way of introducing people to a place.
Meet the City Activity Heatmap:
The image above shows colorful indicators of possible activities on a map of Vienna. It gives you an idea of where you will find an overproportional density of good food, great shops or booze.
This creation doesn’t tell you where you should specifically go, it just shows you in what general direction you will definitely get the experience you are looking for.
Rethinking User Experience — The most simplified fully working solution to my problem wins the prize.
Most modern product redesigns are simplifications of the same functionality. New conventions and gestures allow us to hide more and more content from the user improving focus and removing busyness.
But in this case, simplification wasn’t the issue — the average city guide wouldn’t be a good solution for me, even with the most simplified layout.
Knowing real world user behaviour gives you superpowers to create amazing UX. People tend to approach users only from the context of their app, trying to derive the next feature or product improvement from usage metrics, feedback, etc.
Simple questions like “How would they do it offline?” or “What are they really trying solve with this function?” are great additional perspectives when being stuck with mockups and feature requests.
When visiting a couple of our customer’s offices we saw that they were working with a lot of colors and drawings to spice up their meeting rooms. It’s simply easier to meet at “the pink butterfly” than in “meeting room 6”. So we built color indicators into our navigation to make finding a chat room a tack quicker for our customers than when using comparable products.
If City Activity Heatmap was a Web App:
My current drawing would work a lot better as a map overlay on Google Maps. Unfortunately clicking the coordinates together in the map customization view would take forever. The best solution would be a website in which I could draw the spots with a resizable paint brush onto a map.
After submitting your take on a region the modal of all submissions would result in the official overlay, creating a crowdsourced City Activity Heatmap that everybody could use and that would be easy to maintain.
The biggest advantage is the time it takes to contribute to a guide like this. A local can draw up a heatmap like the one above in less than 5 minutes. The result would provide an authentic and constantly updated look on how residents are experiencing their city.
Some other things people could mark:
- Relaxation
- Good places to flirt
- Jogging
- Most density of hipsters
- Startup areas
- Student areas
- High criminality
- etc.
What are your thoughts on the City Activity Heatmap? Does this fit your travelling style? Let me know by tweeting to @felix_hau or here in the comment section!
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