VAMONDE
Empowering digital storytelling through offline experiences
Challenge
Creating a digital platform for cultural institutions to connect with travelers and other visitors to the city.
Outcome
A content-driven travel platform where cultural institutions and users can create and publish location-based travel experiences. 
Team
I worked as a UX designer and researcher with a design strategist, content strategist, product manager and a 3rd party design and development team, Truth Labs.
Building a case for the user
For an initial alpha release, we wanted to identify the core feature requirements and type of experience we wanted to create. We built user models to better understand the different motivations and requirements that users expect, and how that will inform the delivery of content and level of engagement.

We identified four main user types:  "Out of town tourist", "Follower", "Planner", and "Content creator and consumer"
User Experience Flow
I built this user flow to identify how users access different types of content, save adventures and perform secondary actions on content. The orange indicates a new unique flow, in this case creating a new user profile, and the blue indicates a system operation. There is also a different experience for partners that are designing content for the platform.
How do we enable the power of content to create more immersive travel experiences?
Getting started
Erica, who recently moved to Chicago, wants to learn more about the city and its history. She learns about the Vamonde app and downloads a few adventures that interest her. The View is about the city's architectural history and famous skyline.
Starting your adventure
After she selects the adventure she gets a preview of what to expect. It lets her know how many miles she will travel to complete the adventure and how many different stops she'll visit.
Self-guided tour
She can then view all of the different places to visit and how far away each is from her current location. When she scrolls she'll see the remaining posts that she can visit.
Immersive content
When Erica arrives at each location, Vamonde provides her with different immersive content provided by different cultural institutions. She can view contextual images, audio, and video all while being right there where everything happened.
Usability Testing
After conducting guerrilla research and usability sessions, a critical feature missing was to enable users to preview content and map data. The new interaction model below provides access to secondary information before viewing a post.
Content Framework
To help institutional partners build narratives, we created a content framework that provided guidance on copy styles, use of different media types, and content limits. The above template shows how we built the framework and how it translated to actual implementation in the mobile experience. This enabled a consistent experience for contributors to the platform.
Partnerships as the key growth driver
We found that the best way to build engagement on Vamonde, was to focus more on the cultural partnerships and the content they could provide. We explored a model in which users could create their own content on the platform, but it was difficult to attract users without the rich and immersive content that partnerships could provide.
Key learnings
We found that the best way to build engagement on Vamonde, was to focus more on the cultural partnerships and the content they could provide. We explored a model in which users could create their own content on the platform, but it was difficult to attract users without the rich and immersive content that partnerships could provide.
WORK
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