Travel Experiences

I just started a new project for my Collaborative Workshop run in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing. My team consists of 3 members from Hong Kong and 3 from Beijing so it will be an interesting exercise in communication and teamwork . The project is focused on the “independent tourist on the go,” where the independent traveller is defined as one that arranges their own travel plans rather than going on an organized tour or travelling on business.

We targeted a broad group of travellers that we categorized as the Wandering Traveller, who is spontaneous, free-spirited and loves to connect with the local culture and people while exploring the world. To get a better sense of these travellers, we set up an online survey to collect stories, memories, and photos of people’s travel experiences to understand their values, motivations and what they deem important while abroad.

From our collected surveys, we categorized our wandering travellers into 3 types: those who are “On My Own” enjoy travelling solo and being challenged, “Laid-Back ‘Locals’”  do not feel the need to sightsee but rather just enjoy the place as an everyday local, while those who are “On a Mission” are goal-oriented and create schedules to see and do as much things as possible.

We decided to target our use group to that of the solo traveller as these travellers seemed more varied and interesting. We conducted in-depth interviews to get a better sense of their various backgrounds and demographics, their motivations for travelling alone, and to understand their different concerns and needs while travelling.

After the interviews we were able to illustrate a more detailed description of our target group: the Solo Culture Seeker.

These people come from all around the world of different ethnicities and speaking different languages. We found that many of them tend to travel outside their own geographic area (and outside their own comfort zone). We found a correlation between sociability and the level of adventure exhibited by travellers, that is, the more sociable the traveller and more willing to communicate with other strangers, the more adventurous he/she tends to be.

{ Tags: collaboration, process, travel, user research, visualization }