While working in consulting, I worked as an experience designer on a number of different projects, spanning from an airport redesign strategy to creating a new design centre at a Middle Eastern government client.

This project focuses on my favourite project, i.e, building out a a human-centered design team for a government client, with a focus on tourism projects.

To provide some background, the government client we worked with faced numerous issues, namely:

1. Their processes were dated and very hierarchical
2. Their teams operated in silos, and so with minimal collaboration, company initiatives were not very successful
3. They had limited understanding of their target consumer audience
4. The particular government had a "tainted reputation" with many potential tourists, which they wanted to address

With these issues in mind, we set out to address and solve this government's business challenges, whilst also addressing organizational needs.

Our strategy

We created a 3 pillar approach to our solution strategy, which included:

What we did

Within the government client, we created a "design lab", where team members from across the organization aligned and worked together on one singular business problem

How can we enhance the experience of potential tourists coming to visit the country?

With this in mind, we went through all the stages of the design process.

User research

After conducting a thorough market analyses, the consultant team identified some key segments to focus on for our project, namely being

→ High income, young travellers from European and Western countries, with a high-risk appetite

With this in mind, we conducted user research with potential travellers who fit this category, who were recruited through both personal contacts, as well as through our client's partner research organization.

Through affinity mapping, we then identified some trends between insights

• Travellers had a special focus on "authenticity" - and would often be willing to pay extra to experience other cultures in an authentic way
• Although travellers had a great appreciation to visit and see "untouched" lands, they also struggled greatly with language barriers, especially for basic tasks such as navigation
• Travellers feared breaking the laws in other countries, and the consequences for doing so
• Even if travelers had a negative perception of a country's government, they would still positively appreciate a country's population

Collating insights

We then plotted all of our insights onto a customer journey map in order to identify potential opportunity areas.

The result? The pre-arrival phase was the most important, as during that stage, potential consumers were actively trying hard to acquire information about their destination, and so, it would be the best opportunity to engage with consumers.

Ideation

After focusing on the pre-arrival stage, we conducted a number of ideation exercising including:

• Brainwalking
• Crazy 8's
• "What would 'X' do?"

After conducting these sessions, we came up with many different ideas, including:

• Immersive booths at departure airports with the country's information
• A community platform, where locals of a country can chat to potential tourists
• A digital magazine, to see all of a country's offerings

Ultimately we focused and defined our ideas on some key parameters:

1. Is our solution scalable?
2. Does our solution integrate with the business's existing solutions?
3. Is our solution personalisable for different audiences?
4. Lastly, is our solution technologically feasible?

Prototyping and Testing

We then prototyped through a number of different mediums:

1. Paper prototypes
2. Figma mockups

These designs were then tested through usability testing techniques, such as the think aloud method, which was then used to iterate the design accordingly.

Final design solution:

Our final design solution was the following:

A mobile application which had the following key components:

1. Integration

tThe application would integrate with the existing government visa platform, so that all users who obtained an eVisa would be prompted to download the application. This in turn would lead to an easy transition, and would allow our client to engage with potential travellers in the pre-arrival stage

2. Personalisation

Once consumers would download the application, the application would ask them to enter in their tourism interests, and based on their inputs, show them tailored suggestions for potential places to see. Through the platform, consumers would be able to book tour packages, thus allowing our client to be able to generate a percentage of revenue through revenue sharing with tour providers.

3. Community

In order to address our client's key concerns around reputation, the mobile application would provide a way to talk to locals (who have had a background check done.) This would allow potential tourists to engage with locals, and be able to learn about "hidden gems"

4. Usability

With a focus on usability, the mobile application would not only allow potential travelers to book tours, but to create itineries with integration with travel providers such as Careem. Through this, we aimed to address a fundamental need faces by travelers, i.e, the ability to navigate with ease.

Impact

Our project was incredibly successful, and led to a number of key results:

1. Our client formed a permanent in-house human-centered design team to adopt and scale HCD thinking within the government
2. This, in turn, led to a massive organizational shift, with an enhanced focus on collaboration and user research
3. Although our team left the project after the discovery phase, the project was to be handed to development teams for further exploration

Our biggest challenges

• Ironically, our biggest challenge was not convincing stakeholders (i.e, or client) of the value that design thinking offers - but rather, internally persuading consulting teams about the value design provides over hypothesis-led thinking
• Another challenge we faced was the inability to ensure that our client saw the value resulting from design processes in proportion to the effort, or input required

How we addressed them

• To ensure consulting teams were aligned on our vision, we sent them project plans, with a daily, structured update on our activities, goals and outcomes. This gave them a sense of ease and allowed them to easily follow our progress.
• For our client, we doubled down on the "value" that we created with an extensive focus on artifacts created through the visual design team - included an animated video. By showing visuals, we would be able to get engagement and input from the broader organisational team.

See all case studies below

1

Case Study 1 BCG Platinion

2

Case Study 2

Vezeeta

3

Case study 3

University

4

Other work

Freelance