Design extends beyond products and interfaces. For this project, our client - a Middle Eastern government - was looking to use design to truly transform its infrastructure and its ways of working. Put simply - design was being used to innovate an organization.

There were three main objectives of the project:

1. To introduce design thinking to the government client - and build an experiental "Journeys Lab" that would enable the government to embed it into their organization
2. To use the "Journeys Lab" as a catalyst for a design project; and lastly
3. To upskill the existing team with design thinking methodologies

Background

The government client we worked with faced numerous issues, namely:

1. Their processes were dated and very hierarchical - and so - any form of innovation was "top down".
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 never been opened to tourism (excluding religious tourism) before - and so did not have a "benchmark" to compare against

Our approach

The design thinking process

Discovery and Research

Our consulting team conducted research - through the extensive use of surveys - to understand market segmentation and market needs - as well as identify opportunity areas from a financial perspective. From this market analysis, we settled or concluded that our target customer segment for the design thinking project were

Tourists belonging to the mid-high income category - travelling to the region for leisurely purposes

Using a research agency (coupled with participants recruited through personal contacts), we then conducted interviews to understand the underlying motivations and needs, and understood trends using affinity mapping. These included:

1. The need to understand and be understood. Travellers liked to experience new cultures, but struggled often with language barriers when it came to areas such as navigation or healthcare.
2. The need for safety. Although travellers greatly enjoyed connecting with locals, they often felt a sense of fear around breaking local customs, laws, or being the victims of petty crimes.
3. The need for reliable content. Many regions would have very limited content available about potential tourist regions - and it was often in different languages and so difficult to understand.
4. The need for connection. Travellers longed for a sense of connection with the local connection, to understand their stories, customs, and culture
5. The need for personalisation. With content often being overwhelming, it was often difficult for people to search and find places to travel to according to their preferences.
6. The need for authenticity. Many travellers in such segments placed a special focus on authenticity, and would be willing to pay additional amounts in order to experience it.

Define and Understand

We also used personas and empathy maps to truly empathise into the tourist experience - and along with a customer journey map - used these tools to derive key opportunity areas.

With these insights, we decided to focus our design solution on the pre-arrival stage for potential tourists. This is because from our research, we found that the pre-arrival stage was where most tourists carried out the most research (and thus expressed "bids for support"), and so it was crucial to address tourists concern at this stage.

Design and Ideate

We went carried out a series of ideation exercises, including brainstorming, brainwalking, "What would X do" amongst others. After assessing ideas based on desirability, viability, and feasibility, we conducted a workshop where we invited stakeholders to "dot vote" on ideas. These ideas were then sorted on a matrix and assessed,

After our ideation workshop, we concluded that the strongest idea to explore further was a "journey planner" - which would allow potential tourists to be able to plan their trips to the region. This would address several customer needs - including their need to feel informed and "safe", whilst also allowing us, as the provider, to understand key customer trends and use this information to personalise tourist services.

Additionally - since this idea was digital, it would be easily scaled, with data being able to be used to personalise tourist experiences.

Develop and Test

Initially starting with paper prototypes, we tested different ways of visualising our design solution, as well as different "UX Flows". From low-fidelity paper prototyping, we then moved on to medium and high-fidelity prototypes created using figma.

Our design solution had several components - including:

An "Explore" function - which allowed users to browse different tourist activities based on their interests

A "Plan" function - which allowed users to make plans and itinireries

A "Connect" function - which allowed users to connect and talk to people within Saudi Arabia

Final Design Solution and Impact

Our design solution had several components - including:

After finalising the prototype, we created a roadmap for implementation and identified the MVP - A web-based journey planner.

The journey planner is live, and can be found on https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/plan-your-trip/trip-planner

The "Trip planner" project was very successful - not only at delivering a digital product, but for driving change and transformation in a government. The Journeys Lab has now become a permanent fixture of the organization, and the company has grown from a handful of people to have over 400 employees.

The app can be found live here.

Our biggest challenges

• Cultural change is difficult and takes time. It was often challenging introducing design thinking as a problem solving methodology, and getting buy-in from experts who believed in the more traditional hypothesis-based problem solving
• Extremely tight timeline The entire end-to-end project took a little over 6 weeks, and so was fairly rushed.

How we addressed them

• A lot of communication was needed between different teams to communicate - at every stage - the design thinking process and its impact. At the end of every day, I would send out an email to all key stakeholders with the activities that had taken place, and the output of the activity. By doing so, the larger team was able to stay informed about the design thinking process, without feeling a sense of anxiety about the outcome.
• Alongside the delivery of a digital prototype, we also delivered an animated video which showed the prototype in action. By incorporating a storyline, and using characters, cross-cultural communication was greatly eased, and the video itself was extremely popular with stakeholders.