SukaTrip — making your fun way through Sukabumi
Between all of the waterfalls (curugs), small lakes, caves, hills, mountainside and beach resorts, Sukabumi is just one huge fun area to be in. There is an innumerable number of things you could do while here, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a reason not to stay.
Unfortunately, while Sukabumi has a lot of natural beauty and things to do, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. From our own research — and living here as a resident of Sukabumi! — we learned of a few things that could be improved from the overall experience.
Inconsistent pricing between tourist sites
When there’s natural beauty, there’s an opportunity to make money from care-taking the area. This is the profession of a lot of the villagers and locals who live near the tourist sites. The natural beauty of the area empowers them and encourages the people who come there to share.
The catch though is that those prices can be inconsistent from one tourist spot to another. The prices depend on various conditions, mostly determined by the caretakers living around the area themselves.
As of now, there is no quick way to know how much money is supposed to be spent if you want to come to an area. For some people, this can be a hassle, because if you don’t bring enough, it’s not easy to find an ATM in the wilderness!
Access can sometimes be patchy
Private transportation is really popular in Sukabumi. While there seems to be an okay selection of public transportation, it is pretty hard to find their routing information.
Not only that: road access to the site itself can be patchy. It’s one thing to get to the main entrance of a tourist site, but another thing altogether to cross creeks and rivers trying to get to the site.
In Sukabumi, the problem can be the roads. When they first made it it’s good, but then they deteriorate fast. — Tommy (not real name), 36 years old
It’s not rare to find paths where you can only go on foot, or at most on a dirt bike. — Dina (not real name), 20 years old
None of the current solutions are able to bridge these problems. Google Maps doesn’t feature trail and public transport information to get to a tourist site you want. It also doesn’t feature pricing information.
Enter SukaTrip
SukaTrip is primarily a tourist guide app, designed by and for Sukabumians. As locals, we believe in the potential of our area:
- Helping tourists explore the beautiful wilderness
- Finding the best seaside restaurants
- Or even finding the best fishing spots themselves!
For the first iteration of this project, we started out with two of the problems listed above. These problems were found with research: we ran a survey, interviewed some locals, read statistics, and went to a trip to a curug ourselves!
Here’s a general overview of our process and how we think:
Our research
We used four methods to find out the above problems. There were two major and two minor methods. First off, we ran a survey to understand the problems plaguing tourism in Sukabumi. This was where we found out that prices vary between tourist spots, making it somewhat difficult to plan a predictable cost estimate for a vacation.
- A majority of the respondents to our survey stated that tourist site pricing can be hard to determine
- 68% of Sukabumi residents are young people aged 0–40
- Interview respondents said that they like to visit Sukabumi tourist sites, citing natural preservation as the main reason
Then, we also scheduled live interviews to understand these problems better. For this interview, we invited regular Sukabumi people who loved going out on a tour. From these interviews we learned about their journey patterns and the difficulty of accessing certain touristy spots. As it turned out, a lot of the areas are still very wild and the trails can sometimes be hard to find from the main road!
We also complemented these two research methods with lots of reading, particularly of statistical indices and news stories about the area. As we also did an office outing during this project, we also got to a live view of how it is to travel to the touristy areas!
Meet the personas
After finding out about the problems, now we get to determine our personas! Please warmly welcome: Asep and Rini.
These personas are created through the process of research and we get to know them by determining what the problems are and the pain points. From research, we get to know their problems and the likelihood of their demographics.
Why use personas? Because it allows us to reorient ourselves to our users, when we’re too deep in our heads!
Alright, so Asep is a thirty-year-old husband with two children and a wife, who likes to go out on an outing to the beach each and every chance he gets. It’s just that his family funds being tight as it is, he needs to figure out a way to determine his financial capabilities for these trips. It’s hard to figure that out reliably when the numbers themselves are hard to determine.
Rini is another person who likes to go out on an outing. She’s a student, though, and sometimes she doesn’t have sure access to her own personal transport. She often goes out with her friends to mitigate this problem — hitching a ride in their vehicles — but that gets old quick, and another way is to get on public transportation. Reliable information on how to get around by public transportation to the remoter areas can be hard to find, though.
So we have here our personas and their problems. Stated in more general terms, it means we have a problem of financial uncertainty and of access. The financial uncertainty problem can be solved in many ways, but we’re designing our app to help mitigate that uncertainty. Likewise with the access problem.
Creating the app itself
We started out by getting out of our usual workplace and doing brainstorming, finding ideas. The problems are crystallized into actionable questions, questions such as “how can we help Asep trust that the information we give out is reliable and accurate?” This is known as the “how might we” approach to problem-solving.
We then set out to find ideas on how to solve those problems… with a bunch of colorful markers and paper! The papers are folded out into eight sections. Four people got down in a cafe (with wonderful Sukabumi views of the Gunung Salak and nearby hills) and started sketching out their ideas on those folded sheets of paper.
These ideas are then discussed as to their viability and other aspects, and prioritized. The prioritized ideas are what will make it into the first prototype of the app.
Mitigating the financial problem
It is not easy to solve the financial problem. Some things, like the pricing by the locals themselves or the financial capabilities of the user, can only be negotiated through non-app ways. What we can do include:
- Have users who went by the area recently verify the price
- List that price on the description page and list the amount of verifying users, plus the date of the verification
- When available, have a number provided by the authorities.
These ways are low-hanging fruits and relatively easy to mitigate through the app. We decided to list a number on the site description page and on the itinerary maker, plus the source.
What happens when a user gets different numbers when they’re on-site? They can report that new number through our feedback system, too.
Making public transport and walking trails more viable
The other problem, the one faced by Rini, is a problem of access. She needs to get to the tourist site, but has no way to go there other than through the labyrinthine and often unlabeled public transport. The system in Sukabumi itself is workable with variegated options, but the digital solution can still be worked up.
We decided to prototype a Google Maps-style map, that is able to list the user’s location and work out a path to the nearest point from the tourist site accessible from the public transport. This also works hand-in-hand with the map of the tourist site itself, as they may discourage or even prohibit vehicle access at certain junctions.
The final product
This is the final product as we worked it through Figma! We made a prototype with two working flows for the problems we determined earlier. Feel free to browse through it in this Figma link.
Also, you can check the Behance post here
Conclusion
As beautiful as Sukabumi is, its tourism can be further enhanced with a nice serving of digital infrastructure. We noticed a few pain points for tourists in Sukabumi, such as the difficulty of finding pricing info for the tourist sites and a difficulty of road access.
We mitigated the problem of pricing by providing a crowdsourced or verifiable source of truth, accessible through our app solution.
To solve the access problem, we visited a Google Maps-esque solution by providing alternative transportation routes and walking trails. This solution is helpful for people who want to go to a place with limited financial access, as well as in promoting a more sustainable transport option for our planet.
Feel free to check the Behance presentation here
Check more of our work here
Connect with us: Hello@orely.co