Lonely Planet Works
An app for the ever-moving digital nomad.
GA student group project.
April 2023
Brief
Lonely Planet is a travel website and travel guidebook publisher with a goal to make travel accessible to everyone. Grouped with three other students, we were given the brief that with the rise in digital nomads in the last few years, LP would like to help digital nomads enjoy their lifestyle more by connecting travel and work. LP would like to understand the traveling needs of digital nomads and design solutions to address them.
LP currently only has articles and guides written for general travel and exploration but don’t cater to those taking work on the road (or plane) with them.
Research take aways
Compare: no one-stop -shop
Comparing sites and resources currently used by and made for digital nomads covered some but not all needs and some options could become expensive quickly for someone traveling this regularly.
Interviews point out must haves
Primarily our interviewees needed the same things across the board: a quiet working environment with access to outlets and solid internet connection.
who are digital nomads?
We decided to interview people who traveled with or for their work frequently and spend significant time working away from their “home base.”
our user persona and their journey
"Living free, exploring new horizons, and working remotely - it's the dream."
Jordan:
25-45 year old
digital nomad globe trotter
With a laptop in hand and a thirst for adventure, Jordan has embraced the freedom that comes with being location independent. Whether it's working from a beachside café in Bali or a bustling city in Europe, Jordan enjoys the flexibility and spontaneity of the digital nomad lifestyle.
Pain Points
Planning things in advance has a lot of moving parts, and a lot that can go wrong
Logistical mixups when traveling can be a struggle
Occasionally misses the comforts of home and can feel overwhelmed by new experiences
Our area of focus became the point of research fatigue where we designed around putting the user needs all in one place.
How Might we…
draw upon the mission of Lonely Planet to create a space for digital nomads to find reliable work solutions while traveling?
We collaborated on brainstorming ideas to answer this question and broke off to sketch up our own solutions to get as many options as possible. Mine focused on the location pages and a possible blog/social post similar to a foursquare kind of check in.
Ultimately, we decided to stick to the sketches that most closely followed the main theme of our problem space of finding a reliable place to work, scratching the other ideas for possible later integration.
Designing
We broke up the page designs after establishing a style guide based on the LP offical style guide and following some iOS conventions. I was tasked with the profile and favorites.
Having in mind those must haves of our digital nomads, we created icons which show what amenities are available in possible work locations.
They show up front and center on the location cards and on their corresponding specific location pages, complete with a little clickable legend.
usability testing
considering 3 miss clicks to be a failure:
All testers were able to identify two ways of finding a coffee shop with the required aspects via the carousel or in the search function.
All testers were able to favorite a location with the heart icon.
2/4 testers were able to find the saved favorites in the profile within two miss clicks.
troubles
Users were confused by lack of a back button.
2/4 users tried to click LP logo in order to go to the homepage instead of the house icon.
2/4 users tried to click into the stars to see more ratings if they hadn’t already scrolled to the bottom of the page.
The one user testing on a phone had issues clicking the surface of the favorite heart as well as the search bar.
Improvements
Make inactive heart icon bigger for users to see and easier to click on.
Make the search bar on navigation bigger and easier to click.
Create a back button for users to navigate easily if they need to go back and swipe back is not intuitive.
Click onto stars to see reviews