Making Sydney the Destination of Home
Destination NSW
Designed a community app to promote local businesses and help residents give back to their community.
Duration:
2-week design sprint
1-week high fidelity UI designs
Methods:
Business analysis
User interviews
Persona development
Survey
Empathy mapping
Affinity mapping
Design studio
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability testing
Project type:
Concept project
Team:
2 UX Designers
Tools:
Pen & paper
Google suite
Procreate
Figma
Mural
Zoom
Project Overview
Destination NSW is the leading government agency for the New South Wales (NSW) tourism and major events sectors. Its role is to market Sydney and NSW as one of the world’s premier tourism and major events destinations.
However, due to COVID-19, Destination NSW could no longer rely on tourists and the visitor economy, and needs to pivot its focus into becoming more livable for its own residents
Summary
The Problem
Local residents love to socialise with their friends and family, however, they aren’t interested in large-scale events on a weekly basis as they struggle to keep up with the high cost of living and often feel disconnected from their community.
The Solution
The solution is a mobile app aimed to help local residents find local businesses and give back to their community. The app incorporates:
Dine and Discover loyalty cards - Reward frequent users with incentives and encourage users to engage with their community.
What’s On feature - To promote local businesses, services, and activities which locals can engage with.
Community Builder page - Builds value and creates long-term initiatives to improve the livability of the city.
Token system - Provides locals with a voice in community initiatives and encourages repeat community engagement.
Keep scrolling to read the full case study
1. Conducting research to understand NSW residents
“I like to travel to places where the people and culture are completely different”
5
User interviews
To gain an understanding of our user's behaviours and needs, we conducted 5 user interviews.
Our key learnings were that:
People’s thought processes changed when considering where they want to live vs where they want to travel to.
When choosing a place to live, they choose familiarity, often with surrounding friends or family. Or, a similar cultural and personal lifestyle fit.
When choosing a place to travel, they look for out-of-comfort zone experiences or places that are different from their home.
The majority of people use Facebook, Instagram and social media to learn about activities.
Locals value a sense of community and deem it to be location/ radius based.
Locals like low-key events such as going out to bars and restaurants, parks and beaches.
30
Survey responses
In order to see what locals prioritised and considered more important in their city of residence, we sent out a quick 3-minute survey and received 30 responses. This survey showcased that:
Sydney locals spend the majority of their free time in restaurants and bars.
Residents are very interested in what local amenities, shops and services are available to them.
Sydneysiders primarily engage in activities with their friends or family.
Affordable living and expenses were deemed necessary in order to make Sydney more liveable.
Finding trends in the data
With our users, we conducted an empathy mapping session to help us better understand and empathise with residents’ thoughts and experiences when it comes to living in Sydney.
We used the data from our empathy map, user interviews, and surveys to conduct an affinity mapping session. The affinity map helped us to draw out key trends in the data which we further synthesised into insights to help build our project archetype and drive our ideation phase. The key insights were:
People struggle to keep up with the high cost of living.
People find it hard to save up for a house in Sydney.
People find it hard to get around Sydney efficiently.
Residents don’t like traveling far for amenities.
Residents want a balanced lifestyle with a range of activity options.
2. Crafting the persona
We built a primary archetype based off our user data to help communicate who we’re designing for and to keep their goals and needs at the forefront of our ideation phase.
Meet The Budget Socialite!
3. Ideating and iterating our designs to create the solution
Dine and discover loyalty cards
We conducted a design studio session to brainstorm solutions for our Budget Socialite based on the data and insights gleaned from our research. We collected and combined the strongest aspects from our sketches to create our concept solution.
Key features:
Mirror the Dine and Discover vouchers NSW residents are already familiar with.
Loyalty cards with incentives.
Mobile application to align with the behaviours and tools used by the budget socialite.
What’s On section to provide suggestions on local events, and connect locals to surrounding businesses.
We created an MVP of a loyalty card app that mirrored the Dine and Discover vouchers NSW residents are already familiar with. However, what we found from our MVP was that although the loyalty card helped the user's “cost-saving” goals, the initial approach didn’t solve the “community” problem. Causing us to go back and iterate on our initial sketches. And thus, the “community builder” was born…
Introducing the Community Builder
We were able to identify that the proposed MVP didn’t meet the Budget Socialite’s want to add value to their community which lead us to conduct another design studio to identify a stronger solution surrounding collaborative community efforts.
We found inspiration through the token system used by Grill’d which encourages customers to select a cause to contribute to.
The Community Builder aims to foster a sense of community connection and long-term engagement by:
Allowing users to collect tokens each time their Dine and Discover loyalty card is “hole-punched”.
Locals can allocate their tokens to a condensed list of community projects which reside in their local government area.
Track their impact and earn badges for their engagement and contribution.
The proposed mobile concept solution meets both the user and business goals to encourage community engagement and improve the liveability of Sydney.
Overall, the MVP solution creates an engagement cycle that promotes Sydney and the surrounding services and rewards recurring engagement with the community and app, whilst providing a long-term, continuous initiative that makes the city more livable.
4. The solution in action!
*Note: this is a link to the mid-fidelity prototype created during the design sprint.
How do we make this a reality?
Stakeholder conversations - Initiate conversations with local businesses regarding their capabilities and needs. Additionally, speak to multiple teams within Destination NSW to understand the feasibility and discuss feature prioritisation.
Logistics - Further, explore the logistics of the loyalty cards feature and Community Builder. It’s important to incorporate local and state government departments to understand the capabilities of local governments regarding community projects and coordination. Additionally, further research into the current dine-and-discover vouchers and systems is needed to understand services and tools that can be transferred over to the mobile solution.
Further testing and prototyping - Conduct more usability testing and iterate designs based on feedback and insights.
5. Next steps
6. Reflection and key takeaways
1. Teamwork makes the dream work
When working in a team it’s important to recognise your own strengths and weaknesses and understand your working style and behaviours. Voice these with your team to create a more balanced and integrated environment.
2. Users! Users! Users!
Draw everything back to your users! It’s vital that you’re solving for your user and not bringing in your own bias. By guiding everything back to them it ensures your solution meets their actual need.
3. Trust the process
Even if you don’t know the right answer at the beginning, feedback and design iteration will get you there!