City exploring through immersive storytelling

StoryHunt is about exploring the world at your own pace through app powered audio walks.  You can experience stories about local life, history, culture and much more.But even though the users who used the app generally loved the experience, we had a hard time attracting new users - especially tourits. A lot of the content catered to locals, but tourists had always been a key demographic and we needed to get a better understanding of their needs and define a new way of approaching the app concept.

This involved conducting interviews, design sprints, and guerilla testing to gain a deep understanding of our users' needs and preferences. 

Onboarding users through interests

Even though most tourists we interviewed, didn't want to associate themselves with "tourist traps", they still pretty much said the same things. They wanted to see the sights and learn about local life, food, history and culture.

But at the same time, most didn't want to be bogged down by a fixed route or itinerary. Even though this was always our intent with the app - freedom to explore, the tours themselves were often fixed routes with a start and an end. Therefore we shifted to a new approach: Letting users explore freely, giving them smart suggestions for places to go based on interests and predefined thematic tours.

So instead of just showing available tours at a given location, we would ask the user about interests and show them points of interest. There would still be predefined routes and tours, but now you could also make your own tour or simply just listen to stories, without committing to a fixed route.

Identifying channels to market

It is not uncommon that design and UX becomes very product focused. A “if we build it, they will come” type of mentality. Identifying the right channels to advertise to the right people. And tourist visiting a new city or country are already using services to plan their trip. Services like Tripadvisor, Getyourguide or even just social media recommendations. Getyourguide was identified as a perfect place to sell our product and having our fixed tours available on that platform, saw an increase in sales by more than 400%.