City Guides is an SF based non-profit, that has been successfully offering volunteer led walking tours for 41 years. Their mission; to share their love of the rich cultural heritage, folklore, and history of San Francisco.
Despite good press, good social reviews, and support from local institutions, participation is down.
In this case study, I will highlight my role in sleuthing out reasons for this drop, and explore suggested solutions,
Challenge
Drive attendance by transforming opinion, attracting people, and converting users into champions of the experience.
Solution
Refresh brand by providing a streamlined, user friendly interface, full of desirable, user focused content.
How I Helped
Heuristic Evaluation - Pin pointed problems and devised design strategies to improve the information architecture.
Comparative Analysis - Led research team, compared design features, and brainstormed ways to make City Guides more competitive.
Drafting Survey - Created questions that successfully uncovered useful insights into user attitudes towards guided tours.
Interviews - Dug in deep. Found a knowledgable candidate who could speak frankly about what City Guides does right; and what might be missing.
Content Strategy - Designed solutions for better browse and find. Updated voice and tone to rebrand product for target audience.
Writing for Components - Wrote tour category names for navigation menu; improving usability and discoverability.
Team: Will Smithers, Zach Ungler, myself
Scope; Two week concept project
Process
Research and heuristic evaluation of the company. Comprehend business goals.
Comparative and competitive analysis. See what is working for other companies.
Draft and distribute surveys. Get a broad understanding of behaviors and attitudes of potential users.
Conduct interviews. Dig in deeper with particular subjects.
Hold a design studio with team. Start broad and have fun creatively brainstorming.
Card sorting. Gain insight into how users naturally grouped tours by interest or subject.
Journey mapping. Enabled us see how our user might move through the experience. Here we were able to identify pain points and strategize around information architecture.
Refine design decisions. Begin drafting wireframes and initial copy.
Usability testing. Get feedback on design; especially from subjects who we had interviewed.
Present and defend. We had the chance to receive feedback and answer questions about our choices.
Key Insights from surveys…
Drawing from a survey group of 16 individuals, answering 30 questions, we arrived at the following initial key insights…..
86% of users indicated interest in learning more about local community history, but only 26% saw guided tours as a good way to do so.
Herein we saw opportunity to increase participation within this demographic.
“City Guides is fine.”
— Tour guide working for competitor
I interviewed a guide with 10 years experience leading tours, currently working for a competitor. When asked for her impressions of City Guides, she paused, then answered, “City Guides is fine” Ooph!
We could do better than that.
Additional interviews suggested ways we might make City Guides better than fine.
Unique - Locals felt they had seen major SF landmarks. They wanted a specialized experience; something “out of the box”
Interactive - Locals indicated tour guide qualifications were important. They wanted engaging, funny, knowledgable guides with insider information.
Engaging - Rival companies were offering more polished, inviting digital experiences. We needed to make our product equally engaging.
Attractive - Locals viewed tour taking as “touristy” and preferred more relevant feeling events.
Community - Interviews suggested that word of mouth, and social media sharing were key ways locals gained information about events.
Hypothesis
We hypothesized that by updating the user interface, integrating social media sharing, better organizing tours to highlight uniqueness, including user reviews, and implementing guide qualifications and biographies, we could convert locals into fans of our product and convince them to become champions of our experience.
But first, we’d have to give users a better ways of discovering the tours themselves.
The best way to kill attention is a wall of text…
Here is what City Guides’ homepage looked like as we started.
Where is the user supposed to focus on this page? They are bombarded with conflicting messages. There’s no hierarchy to this content.
The first step is to declutter the visual experience; reorganizing, renaming, and editing the information the user must sort through.
In this way we can help guide the user instead of frustrating them.
Edit, edit, and edit again.
Our initial prototypes demonstrates a move away from text heavy, to image driven layout. This is more current, and visually easier for the user to maneuver.
We prioritized Upcoming and Featured tours, to help promote tours in need of greater attendance, and those that would soon expire.
Improved information architecture makes items easy to find. We provided suggested options our user doesn’t have to search for.
We then set out to improve the way a user can maneuver through the experience by restructuring the navigation.
Too much choice paralyzes…
City Guides offers 80 different tours, only discoverable through scrolling down the entire list.
Many tour titles are long and don’t readily provide information about what the tour is actually about.
I gave users more context and clarity by writing concise, informative tour category titles.
The name game
Through open card sorting, I categorized the 80 tours into 18 umbrella topics, allowing users easier ways to find and understand options.
Categories provide users insight and context for the content, and reinforces the information hierarchy.
Even if our user never bothers to read the remaining tour copy, these categories provide them instant recognition and understanding.
Our redesigned “Tour” page included suggested tour category titles. The aim was to help users identify the kind of unique and specialized experience they were desiring.
This was a great first step, but the category names still needed to be refined to meet the voice and tone of our brand.
In further iterations I was able to condense the list from 18 to 12 category names for tours.
It was important that these names remain informative. But I also wanted them to generate interest and curiosity.
I had to consider City Guides brand. “Naughty or Racy” was a bit much for a company with such strong ties to the Public Library and city government. “Spicy” spoke to the adult themes in a more subdued way.
Other tours such as “Gangs” didn’t seem to fit either. I included this tour in “Culture Dive.” Not only was this more in line with the City Guides voice, it evoked the act to learning. This was on-brand with City Guides’ mission.
Initial usability testing provided favorable feedback from users. This became especially evident when one interviewee - previously adamant walking tours didn’t interest her - viewed our redesigned pages and said;
“Oh Wow! I would totally take one of these tours.”
— Reformed interview subject
Results and reflections
Our team worked with considerable time constraints, and a small data set. Still, we were able to find solid insights and solutions under imperfect conditions. Of the ten people we conducted usability testing with, 100% of them indicated the experience had been improved.
If given more time, I would love to continue iterating on the tour category names, titles of tours, and remaining copy; making sure it’s concise, conversational, clear, and in the voice consistent with City Guides’ brand. I had only scratched the surface.
Although we knew there was still work to do, we viewed this as a positive initial step in an iterative process. And there were some concrete indications that we were on the right track…
Epilogue: When art imitates life…
Interestingly enough, shortly after our project ended, City Guides did renovate their web site, implementing many of the same changes we’d suggested during our concept sprint.
Changes made to City Guides are in line with our suggestions
Categories - Offered ways to search for tours by topic.
Guides - Offered more information about their guides’ qualifications.
Tours - Highlighted 80 “unique” tours on the homepage.
Neighborhoods - Offered ways to search for tours by neighborhood.
Make Over - Modernized the overall look of the site; more white space, more graphics, more images.
Social Media - Encouraged participants to share on social media and added additional links.
Hierarchy - Made improvements to the information architecture of the site.
Featured - Used the home page to highlight featured tours.
These changes include the establishment of tour category titles, not unlike those I had begun working on with my team.
It’s interesting to see where we might have ended up, given more time and revisions.
Looks like we were on the right track…
Wanna know more? Ask me about some of the other inventive ideas we had for attracting people to the City Guides experience, getting them engaged with our product, and turning them into converts who will champion our experience.