Meeting users wherever their feet may roam
SUMMARY
Transforming Lonely Planet’s content for the digital world enabled users to access travel information from their phones, while still marketing the guidebooks. The goal was to update highly visited surfaces of the website while building a robust design system for efficiency.
PROJECT
Lonely Planet Digital Transformation
RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead Designer
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
User Research
Usability Research
Hiring for UXR and PD
TIMELINE
2018–2019
Challenge and Opportunity
Lonely Planet has been known for 50 years for its “off-the-beaten-path” travel books. Fast forward to today, where users are more likely to grab their phones for information rather than searching within a guidebook. The content that made Lonely Planet what it is today was at risk of being swallowed up by other more digital-savvy competitors.
While Lonely Planet did have an existing website, the long-term strategy was to improve upon it to create a robust ecosystem in which writers from around the world could easily submit content via the back end of the system. This meant that it needed to undergo a redesign as well. And in order for both of these to happen in parallel, we needed a design system.
Our small team brainstormed and asked ourselves:
How might we make LP content more accessible to our users while creating the ecosystem of the future for our writers?
Solution
In order for our plan to be a success we needed to invest in two key areas:
Updated Designs 🎨
Lonely Planet’s website, which hadn’t been updated in 3 years, needed an overhaul that balanced inspiration with informative content.
A Robust Design System ⚙️
Lonely Planet’s website was static in nature. As we leaned into a long-term strategy of creating a full-fledge platform, it was imperative we create and manage a robust design system in parallel so that design updates could be easily implemented and writers could upload their content.
Process
PHASE 1: ASSEMBLE A DESIGN SYSTEM CREW
Because Lonely Planet teams operated in pods, the first order of business was to assemble a “crew” of people from various pods to work on design system. Having experience at other organizations building design systems, I knew I needed people who were passionate about the work and who would advocate for the design system in other areas of the company. This crew would be the team to decide how to build the design system and what to include in it, with my leadership and system experience guiding them.
It was important to spin up this crew as early as possible to give the engineering team time to figure out the nuances and complexities of transforming the static website into a dynamic platform. I put a process in place for us to follow with regular check-ins as we tested and experimented with different content management systems (CMS) and other foundational requirements.
The crew eventually settled on the name “Landmark” for the design system.
PHASE 2: RUN USER RESEARCH ON CURRENT WEBSITE
Once the design system crew gained traction, I switched gears to run user research on the current website across all high-visibility surfaces, including the following:
Homepage
Destinations (continents, countries, cities—with the majority of traffic coming to these pages)
Points of Interest (attractions, experiences, lodging)
The goal was to focus my efforts on leading a redesign of these three surfaces so that Landmark could be populated with the most commonly used patterns. This allowed us to test the design system functionalities as well as test the experience for a custom page builder.
User research indicated that while the current site was nice to look at, it lacked functionalities that users considered tablestakes and didn’t contain the updated media items users came to expect from a travel website.
Results
Within just a few weeks of integrating freshly-designed components into Landmark, we were able to stand up a new page on our dynamic platform. Writers were able to contribute their work directly into the CMS on the backend and the product teams were able to rally around the idea of a robust ecosystem which unlocked opportunities never before explored.
“[Nicole] is one of the brightest UX/UI product designers I have ever met. Her ability to understand what users actually need (vs. what we think they need) in a digital product and matching that to business objectives is on another level.”
— Mitchell Lawson,
Director of Digital Product at Lonely Planet
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