Focus Persona/user – Someone who is a tourist and visiting a city for short term.
This user group has a few unique needs:
- They are short in time and would like to see the most interesting places (based on their level of interests) in the city
- They eat out every day
- They want to experience new things in the city
- They don’t have easy access to the internet and would appreciate finding places that offer free internet (Starbucks)
- They want to get public transport information
- They don’t have a lot of information about various neighbourhood
There should be two modes –
1. Planing Mode (which should be part of online mode when user is connected to internet), and
2. Offline – transition mode (where user is out exploring the city).
Now, let’s focus on needs listed above –
i. Limitation in time –> Allow users to change the tour path while being in offline mode. They might decide that one place is more interesting than they originally anticipated and would like to spend more time. Allow them to adjust their path as they go through the touring experience
ii. They eat out every meals and need to find the right places to eat –>
a) Present recommendations on the restaurants at the time of tour planning (online/planning mode)
b) Load list of restaurants, reviews, menu that are close to the tour path. Allow user to change their decision and view details about other restaurants in their path. (the recommendations are saved on the planned path)
iii. They want to experience new things in the city –>;This will be a standard functionality that a touring app will have. Ask for their interests and use data collected to make recommendations on the route. The recommendations could be based on user generated votes.
iv. They don’t have easy access to the internet and would appreciate finding places that offer free internet (Starbucks)–>;
a) During the planning phase, ask user if they want internet during the day. If they do, load list of places with free internet into the offline mode.
b) Allow user to either search for internet hubs in the offline mode and show places with free internet.
v. They don’t have a lot of information about the unique attributes of each neighborhood. Render such information into the planing/offline mode of the app. Also, while planning show the unique attributes of the areas user want to explore.
This is just a small list of features that would enable offline touring. But they can help build a MVP. If I also wanted to prioritize the solutions above, my criteria for the prioritzation would have been customer impact (how big of a problem is it solving), and cost (how easy is it to build this?). Here are my assessments of the features –
1. Medium, high
2. a) High, low | b) Medium, high
3. High (must have), medium
4. a) High, low | b) Medium, high
5. Medium, low
Features 1, 2b, 4b have a lot of commonalities in implementation. They all rely on potentially integrating with other services to pull the information from them and need ability to search locally on the phone. In the list above, I would prioritize 2a, 3, 4a as my first priorities, then 5 as my second priority and 1, 2b and 4b as my third priorities.