Building a Travel Marketplace to Connect Travelers to Unique Cultural Experiences

Bridge Travel App

Connecting Travelers to Unique Cultural Experiences

Services Product Design

The Challenge

Bridge is a startup on a mission to inspire global human connection through cultural experiences. They want to create a world where tourism and connection is always at your fingertips.

After working in corporate America for a few years, they noticed everyone was always talking about how they wanted to spend their vacation. This has been magnified by social media travel culture. People are excited about discovering new experiences across the world, capturing those memories, and sharing them with friends.

So they came to us to design an app that would bring their vision to life.

The Solution

We began with a discovery session to understand the business goals, define their customer profile, and create a product one-pager. This is always a great exercise to ground the overall design process. Then we conducted a brand positioning exercise to better articulate the brand voice in the identity.

Once we understood the people problems and the brand values, we mapped out 3 core use cases as the primary jobs to be done and used those to guide the process from start to finish.This captures what the app needs to do and how it adds value for people.

The Mission

INSPIRE GLOBAL HUMAN CONNECTION THROUGH CULTURAL EXPERIENCES

The Vision

A WORLD WHERE TOURISM AND GLOBAL HUMAN CONNECTIVITY IS ALWAYS AT OUR FINGERTIPS

After working for a few years, we noticed everyone was always talking about how they wanted to spend their vacation. This is magnified by social media travel culture. People are excited about discovering new experiences across the world and capturing the moment.

Business Principles

Know the user better than anyone else

Create infinite value for cities

Connect individuals from all walks of life

Inspire new experiences, at the right time, for the right people

Provide productive tourism solutions that are flawlessly integrated from end to end.

Core Values

Supporting local economies

Connect people to each other

Help people broaden their horizons

Let people have fun

Brand Positioning

Culture

Free

Voice

Exciting

Values

Discover, capture, and purchase travel experiences

Audiences

Adventurous

Benefit

Enlightened, informed, inspired

X-Factor

Seamless, social, and organized

Customer Profiles

Demographics

Middle class young professional who works a 9-5, but needs a get-away from time to time

Challenges

They want to explore the world, but don’t know:, Where to go, What to do there, How their favorite people are traveling.

They have to use multiple platforms to: Get inspired, Plan and book, Capture their experience.

Solutions

Aggregated variety of experiences and content by destination
Discover tailored recommendations
Save and coordinate trips
Capture and share trips, photos, experiences

Product on a Page

What does it do?

Discover travel experiences, plan trips, share your memories, connect with other travelers

Why is it needed?

Discover unique experiences and plan their trips

What does it do?

Discover travel experiences, plan trips, share your memories, connect with other travelers

Why is it needed?

Discover unique experiences and plan their trips

Use cases

Finding destinations, accommodations, and things to do

Curated explore feeds for each category Robust inventory of unique content

Planning trips and experiences

Saving content and activities for future reference and sharing

Sharing your travel moments and connecting with friends

Consuming, sharing, and creating content

We started by going through a user journey experience to put ourselves in the shoes of the end user. We started by thinking through what their key questions were as they navigated the process of discovering travel experiences and planning their trips.

Then did a brainstorming exercising to think how might we help travelers given their expectations of how to filter through and find the trip that’s right for them.

Once we really understood the mind of the user and how they would go about things, we mapped out the information architecture of the app. This captures how information is organized throughout the app.
There are a lot of ways to map out user journeys and architecture, but to stay nimble, we opted for simplicity.

Each box below represents an action that a user can take in the app. At the top it shows what they would see, at the bottom it shows what they can do. Once they take an action, they are redirected to another surface of the app where they have another set of options available to them based on where they are in the user journey.