Jazan, Neighbor of The Moon
Tourism app UX design case study for the region of Jazan, Saudi Arabia
1. Overview
My team and I had the pleasure to design a tourism application for the region of Jazan, Saudi Arabia for our UX design boot-camp with Misk Academy.
Jazan is not well known as a tourist destination in Saudi Arabia just yet despite the wonders of nature that this region possesses along with beautiful and unique culture, heritage and history that most Saudis do not know about but are very curious to experience. In this case study, I will break down the main points and milestones we went through in the past two weeks to create this project, where we empathized with our users, defined the scope of the problems and ideated solutions and features based off of our research. We then prototyped our product along with doing extensive testing to reach the best user experience for our app design.
2. Problem statement
Locals of Saudi Arabia and international tourists are interested in Jazan’s local culture and nature. They have a problem that they do not know much about Jazan, as there are no good ways to plan trips to there. They also want to experience Jazan like the locals as well as learn about its culture and history. We aim to create a solution that will deliver a way for them to feel knowledgeable about Jazan and excited to explore everything around them with locals or on their own.
3. Persona
Our persona is Abdullah. He is a 28 year-old Saudi resident who works in the private sector. He is extroverted since he likes to meet locals and experience their culture with them when he travels. He also is family oriented but likes to travel with friends as well when seeing new places. Abdullah is a flexible planner and loves to go on adventures in natural settings. He is tech-savvy, physically active and wants to create amazing memories with family and friends and try new things and experience new cultures. His goals when traveling is to experience things like the locals and learn about the nature, history, heritage and culture of the location he visits. Abdullah does not like unsafe travel to places and likes having a light plan and knowing more about the places he goes to before or during his trip.
4. Process and what we did
We used the double diamond approach by first doing research, where we discovered the problems and found insights into them. Then we explored further and defined the problems’ scopes through more research, interviews, surveys and affinity mapping. Finally, we did business analyses to define business needs, direct and indirect competitors, important features and user needs. To help us with narrowing down the features and to create a minimum viable product during the solution phase of the double diamond, we created a unique product that suits Abdullah’s needs after testing many times throughout the prototyping phase up until the high fidelity frames as well.
User Research
We conducted 94 surveys and 17 interviews in order to create our persona Abdullah and we had many insights in response to their answers to our questions after affinity mapping all answers and comments.
Survey insights:
- 95% of our survey takers have never visited Jazan.
- 90% of them want to visit some day.
- 80% prefer to plan with family, however our interviews said otherwise, where they talked more about traveling to new places with friends.
- Also, 65% of the survey takers like to plan ahead of their trip but are willing to change plans if something more interesting comes up.
- And finally, 57% of the survey takers prefer activities over sightseeing, which makes us think that both are important features for when visiting Jazan.
Interview insights:
- They did not have any knowledge about Jazan and that was the main reason why people did not go and see the place.
- They plan by word of mouth so they ask friends for suggestions first before going somewhere because of lack of good information online.
- They visit new local places via instagram travel groups where they trust their peers so they like to go on guided tours by other Saudis through instagram pages dedicated to this. However, this method is too expensive and also not flexible enough for Abdullah.
- They generally like to plan their trip but are flexible.
- They want to meet locals and have a local experience. Meeting locals and having a local guide seems like a high priority by the users, in order to experience the culture authentically.
Business Analysis
Our main competitions for the product we aim to design are Airbnb, Airbnb Experiences, Show Me Around, Pokemon Go and Google Maps. Airbnb has a great way for booking in terms of user friendliness and logical placements of buttons and calls to action as well as co-creation in relation to the experiences section of Airbnb. Show Me Around is an app which allows you to book locals anywhere you travel for an experience by that local based on the hour. Pokemon Go implements AR the best compared to other apps, and is used as a best practices example for other apps which are starting to add AR features in tourism, historical learning and museums right now.
We also looked at indirect competition in order to create the best experience with our app design for Jazan tourism. We looked into the highest rated tourism apps and websites around the world along with local Saudi websites and apps such as VisitSaudi, Al-Ula and EnjoySaudi to see what they do well in and what gaps to fill for our Jazan tourism app design.
SWOT ANALYSES
SWOT analysis insights: Jazan has high potential with the tourism sector and can create more opportunities for the locals. With all of this great potential, Jazan does not promote itself as it should . In addition, it has low quality of services which needs to be updated for a tourism boom.
C&C ANALYSES
C&C analysis insights: Airbnb was our main competition with its features, and it helped us implement the best practices in the scope of our application. Al-Ula was a great example of having the flaw of only having an AR feature that is limited in the app and there’s not much information to explore before going there. As for the other websites, Airbnb had the best experience for booking experiences and booking generally had the clearest wording and easy and very obvious choices to make when booking. The websites need to breathe and have fewer words and more high quality photos, and need good reviews as well for the user to ask and find information that they need when going to a new location.
POSITIONING MARKETING
The most effective websites are the websites that can tell a story about the city, locals and culture at the same time. it gives the user the ability to plan, learn, explore, and book in one place. Some websites had some 360 / online experiences that just added so much value to the overall website experience.
LEAF DIAGRAM
For the Leaf Diagram, we focused on our main competitors for the features that we decided on in the end based on user research and business analysis.
LAYOUT ANALYSES
For the layout analyses, the home page has a large header that fills the page, to show off photos of the country/region/city and the best practice seems to be to show the most important features in the website/app home page. Most of the sites do not have accessibility or family-friendly options. Some have it but it’s very hidden. Norway has a great map with very detailed and useful filters
THE GAP OUR PRODUCT FILLS (USER NEEDS VS BUSINESS NEEDS)
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
For the heuristic evaluation, most websites had a lot of the information in the navigation bar. The websites usually add a book button there for the user to book a room. However, other websites does it by different categories. the errors most of the websites handle them correctly. For every website, UI reflects the city and the mood of the city.
Main Features
The main features were then chosen out of many ideas based on our user research and business analyses by doing feature prioritization.
We broke down our application for Jazan tourism into three parts and key features after doing the feature prioritization, to create a minimum viable product:
These key features will help Abdullah first learn about Jazan through the story mode, then also book experiences with local guides before going, and experiencing Jazan directly and alone with Augmented Reality. All of these features solve Abdullah’s user needs and pain points when wanting to visit Jazan.
Abdullah’s Experience before and after the application:
USER JOURNEY
Branding
We also ended up creating a brand for our Jazan tourism app, where we delved into the culture and heritage of Jazan and focused on the orange for the culture and grey for the weather and light blues for the ocean.
Card sorting, Sitemap and User Flow
CARD SORTING AND SITEMAP
We can use filters to reduce how many cards go under the planning section. Planning your trip and explore and learn are common themes to the card sorting and are a lot of the times separate features on the home page.
USER FLOW
Annotated Wireframes
From the home page or the navigation bar you can book a local experienceIn this page the user will see a card of information that have ratings, experience name, and the price per hour. Also the user can find about section, gallery for the experience, and a review section. From the local experience you can choose the local you want to experience with. Here the user can edit the date, time, number of guests. The user can choose how many guests they want and can choose the available time to book. The user will get a confirmation about the booked experience next in the form of a pop up box for the pending booking. After booking, a pending notification will show up in the profile page and from that page you can pay for the local experience. You go through simple steps to pay within the application and the user can find different ways to pay with a “Maroof” logo which means our app is safe and trustworthy when paying. A pop up will show that your pending experience is approved! The user will also be able to click on the AR map from the navigation bar, where the AR tab will have researched information about the place and media like music, poetry, videos and historical and interesting facts to experience on their own. From the AR map you can click on the regular map and click on the filters to find what you need or want through our filters.
Testing
This is the inventory of old designs and wireframes which we fixed on multiple occasions after doing user testing on 5 users on many occasions from low fidelity to high fidelity versions. We redid our wireframes three times and our main pain point was the book a local guide sequence where we needed a lot of input after finding out that the process was confusing.
High Fidelity Prototype Video
Future Work
- We want to expand on the journey of booking a local experience.
- We want to test it with more local users and develop the local user experience.
- We want to create custom content for the AR incorporation with more locals like folklore stories.
- We want to include a gamification experience in the AR like badges for areas you visited.
- We also want an Arabic version of our app, since Abdullah our persona is a Saudi local.
