Feedback from Exercise #4

During the fourth exercise we presented our designs and progress so far. The feedback inspired a couple of ideas for our design "Route Planner", which is by the way still a placeholder name. This post is about some ideas and concepts.

Feedback

One of the important aspect of the Route Planner is to provide the user of the service a better and faster experience than what they could have manually searching for all the information brought together by the service. This goal is pretty easy to achieve but to maintain high quality content on such a service the need for user-generated feedback, such as comments, are a nice feature for both the user who expresses herself and the receiver.

Target Groups

After the presentation one in the audience said that tourists are a nice fit into our target group. This statement is completely true and to be honest our group hadn't thought about all the tourist because we simply did not see any during our field studies. This also brings up a flaw in our field studies, we missed the high season for museums. The people going to museums spike in the summer as the rush of tourists flood the city. This made us miss a whole target group. But to our defence the Route Planner is by design made to fit every one who wants to go to a museum. This will hopefully be achieved by good interface design in the outlets (website + companion app + printout).

Like Trivago for museums            

Thinking ahead we sat down and thought about ways to monetise this service. I narrowed it down to pretty much three and a half options. 

1. Trivago

This option is to model the entire business as the trivago model. In order to fill the service with information and data (pictures, et cetera) we could make it in such a way that the museums pay us to be featured on our service. The prerequisite is that the museum itself provides us with high-quality assets and such for the routes. Basic information will also be included in this bundle. This information could include; opening hours, prices, nearest subway station, and such. 

The approach has a couple of nice things going for it. For starters it is simple to understand and liberates us from the job to generate content for our service. We will just process their information and thus bring value to the end user. 

There is one main problem with this approach, that being the sale of our service to the museum itself. Why should they want to pay us anything when we do not have anything to show for it. 

   2. Curated

This approach is simple and dirty. We will bring in the information from the museum by visiting them. After this we will need to bring ads onto the service, which represents the 'dirty' part.

Below is the raw notes I took during the exercise.

FEEDBACK

            * FEEDBACK SYSTEM   (+ COMMENTS/USER GENERATED CONTENT!?!/WIKIPEDIA STYLE??)

            * TARGET GROUP: TOURISTS? (+ INCLUDE "This might interest you")

            * LIKE TRIVAGO FOR MUSEUMS VS CURATED SYSTEM ( One OR the other )

                - THEY JOIN OUR NETWORK, WE CHARGE THEM A SMALL FEE TO APPEAR ON OUR SITE. (SNOWBALL EFFECT .. SLOW)

               ( - WE CURATE AND GATHER INFORMATION -- ADS == MONEY)

               ( - AD-SUPPORTED ? On mobile, web and perhaps printout? )

               ( - SELL USER INFORMATION )

        

            * ALTERNATIVA RUTTER: 1) Speed/Crucial 2) All-of-it