Wander City

Wander City was a startup based at Innovation Birmingham Campus. It’s focus was to build a platform for city travel. Started by Iain and Alberto in summer 2014 their objective was to connect people to places and events. Its vision was to help people create and facilitate meaningful experiences.

I got involved with the project as it aligned with my passions of travel and helping people use digital technology to personalise/customise their experiences. I wanted to gain experience in:

• Field research
• Problem solving using creating thinking
• User research and testing

Social media and local organisations

Social media is key to travel nowadays. People will ask for recommendations on Facebook, Twitter and look at images in locations on Instagram. I monitored social media for travel stories and cultural trends within the city and any tours or trips advertised by organisations such as Marketing Birmingham or specialist agencies.

User Research

I created surveys, conducted one-to-one and group interviews and ethnographic research.

Surveys

I created a basic Typeform to ask people about their gems in the city:

Hidden Gems

This was the first form created after using Google Forms. I decided to switch as it was much more user friendly. We had an improvement of form completions and more people using their smartphones to complete the survey. I used the data to start to build a picture of who might use Wander City and collated all the gems towards inputting into the API.

Interviews

I conducted hours of interviews with many people from various backgrounds:

• Students
• Local business owners
• Photographers and artists
• Families

Below are doc examples of my write ups:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1INS9cfkHIEN2HPRexLj_kTZscZ15Fxk8Qb_R65-uoos/edit

Doc of Interview write ups

Ethnographic Research

To understand a specific user group (Artists and photographers) I went to an Instagram meet up co-organised by Marketing Birmingham and IgersBirmingham. The purpose was to see how this social group interact, examine their behaviour and understand their motivations.

I spent the day with a group of people who were a mix of amateur and professional photographers and felt like I got to understand them at a deeper cultural level.

I felt this research exercise helped me to create a richer narratives and strengthen the design process.

Designing prototypes:

Below are sketches taking from a rapid prototyping exercises I conducted throughout my time at Wander City:

Moqups Project Link:

https://moqups.com/Rupidosanjh/FxBjfAnZ

This was an idea for one of the team’s trip to Glasgow. Using a few questions to design a prototype quickly to start testing and gathering insights.

Workshops

Connecting with local organisations such as Yelp Brum and Impact Hub Birmingham for collaborations proved successful. I developed and facilitated two workshops at Impact Hub Birmingham to test beta stage features for the service.

Workshop 1 — What are your hidden gems in Birmingham?

Creating a ‘drop in style’ workshop that would take a maximum of 5 minutes to complete people were asked what their favourite gems in Birmingham are? They ranged from hotels, sports/community venues to vantage points across the city.

The process involved:

• asking people to tell us about their gem
• highlighting on the map
• logging it into Wander City’s API (at this stage a prototype MVP)

Workshop 2 — Create a guided tour around Birmingham

Workshop 2 invited new participants to create a guided tour around the city. The brief given was flexible. They had the choice of using the gems collated from the previous workshop or find their own new gems. A time limit was given for planning. But it was their choice to use it as a guide or create their own itinerary.

Observing the team dynamics

Four people took part. Two already knew each other and two were individuals with no connection to the others. So it was interesting to see how they spent their first hour getting to know each other and form a bond.

Creating the route.

Exploring the City

Using the videos and gems from the previous day they started to put a route together. Starting from one side of the city (South) taking in the main shopping district, towards the new library, and canals.

The outcomes from both workshops resulted in a greater understanding of people’s behaviour, use of technology, organisation and relationships. Using video and photography proved really useful for analysis and reflection. These key factors heavily influenced design and development of user stories, prototypes and product features.

The experience of planning and facilitating workshops really appealed to me as I was using my skills and knowledge to help people connect with the city. This was a great experience with Wander City and I thoroughly enjoyed the project. No day was the same. Highlights for me were user research processes, creating and facilitating workshops, sketching ideas and building prototypes.