Tourism service design for China rural village
A project for fighting extreme poverty in Southwest China
2015
STARTING POINT
At the beginning, the requirement of this project was designing the online service for room, meal and tourism reservation services within WeChat web app for TongGuan Village located in Southwest China. Before starting UI design, I prepared questions and used service design tools to clarify the entire tourism experience:
Where will this service being provided? Why is this village?
Why do we provide this online services?
How many features do we cover and how are we going to design for that?
My Role
Service design (user interview, user journey map, service blueprint, prototyping), UI architecture, Wireframing, Interaction design
Research: starting from Investigate existing journey
The investigation started from identifying the tourism user journey in three phases, before trip, during the trip, and after trip. I firstly did some desk research for getting some ideas of how would the tourism service being provided. Then I went for a trip to the village and explored the entire journey to look into the real journey.
Empathy mapping
I found that there were several gaps within the entire tourism service. For example, travellers from city are not familiar with this village. Also the limited resources and manpower caused several potential tourism service gaps.
Traveller
Don’t know how to get to the village easily
Not familiar with the village
It’s hard to find the accommodation
Need tour information
Villager
Lack of young people to provide service
Limited service skill and experiences
Don’t know how to promo or sell service
Discover problems and opportunities
According to the interview with several local villagers and tourists. I found the lack of channel for selling crops caused villagers live in poverty. Also, lots of young people are leaving village and moving to cities for jobs. Their valuable cultures are getting vanished. How to support village’s economy and also preserve their culture would be the real challenge.
Insight - the ultimate goal
The ultimate goal of this tour service system was soon defined as building the ecosystem to support the sustainability and cultural preservation in those traditional village. To achieve this, we came out the following strategy and direction:
Introduce self-help reservation services for tourists in order to provide basic travel experience even without enough manpower
Promote the attractions of village to tourists and make sure users can have smooth village travel experience and be willing to recommend the experiences to their friends
Finally build up a ecosystem which will provide more employment opportunity in the village
Online tour service design
The entry of online tour system is from the village’s WeChat official account, which is leveraging the most popular channel in China. The official account provides web links of tour information, travel booking system and online shops.
Reservation System
We design the online booking web page for villagers and also building the online payment system. Tourists can browse and book the accommodations in official account directly.
Tour Package
To help visitors prepare for their trip, I worked with project team design several tour packages. With photo and text introductions, users can easily find the cultural activities they might be interested, customise and reserve online.
Self-checkin and Virtual room key system
Consider the lack of manpower in village, we leveraged the technology of WeChat to provide virtual door key to manage room and check-in/out services. Whenever tourist reserve room successfully, the room number and virtual door key will be assigned to their ID then they will find it in WeChat. User can complete self-checkin and get into their room by scan the QR code on the door.
Consistent visual identify from online to offline
To provide a consistent travel experience, our visual team design a VI system which is applied to both online services and way-finding in the physical space. Our purpose is creating memories thru the visual symbols online, and when tourists visit the village, they will get involved in the culture and scene naturally.
Results and Influence
In three months, over 1,700 tourists had visited TongGuan Village. Visitors from modern cities now have can easily explore the tradition culture and lifestyles in ancient towns and villages by simply using online services on mobile. More job opportunities offered to villagers brought more chances to encourage young people stay, inherit and preserve their precious cultural heritage.
The female villager eared total 4,000 RMB by selling her hand-made towels used in accommodations during the 3 months
Young villager decided to stay in village because getting a job of building and maintain the architecture
Villagers perform their folk songs with their traditional instrument for tourism
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