The Product
Musement is a local city guide for finding and booking activities. With manually curated content for 29 cities and aggregated content for 321 other.
This product sits within the travel service industry, similarly to Foursquare, TravelSupermarket, and AirBnB.
The Problem
The product had reached a growth milestone, thousands of users were consuming and booking events through its iOS app.
The problem to be solved was international expansion.
My Role
I was brought in by a CEO due to my product design expertise to help define the international expansion strategy and how that would reflect within the app.
The Team
This startup had a team of senior content managers, in-house developers and data scientists who had previously worked at companies like Expedia and lastminute.com supporting the initial MVP.
This supporting team would turn out to be a great source of information during my initial research.
On a daily basis, I worked with the product owner and had frequent catch-ups with C-level stakeholders.
The Process
The project lasted only a few weeks, but during that time I was briefed by the CEO and Product Owner about their roadmap, researched the market and internal staff, and produced recommendations for strategy and app interface.
I flew to Milan and worked from their offices for a week, and completed the rest of the work remotely.
Work was initially presented and discussed face-to-face to C-level and Product Owner, and final handover remotely.
The Outcome
The first outcome of this project was a set of recommendations on how to build a global community: 1) start with local community cells, 2) provide a reward system for building considerable content and leverage both consumers and professionals such as hotel concierges, 3) and finally bring it all together by promoting the global community for travellers.
The second outcome was an interactive prototype for content discovery and booking. An improvement over the initial MVP not just visually but for taking personalisation, weather, and other factors into account.
Finally, sketches for a reward system, personalisation, tourist helper, were also provided.
Key Learnings
This project provided an interesting insight into this section of the travel industry, it would prove useful just a few months later when I joined TravelSupermarket to work on a similar product.
Lasting only a few weeks, this was also a good exercise of squeezing down the production process into just a few weeks, a precursor to the Google Design Sprint I would later do with much larger clients such as EDF, and KFC (1, 2).
