Universal Mind Helps Change the Conversation About Educational Assessment
NFT: An innovative mobile experience for travelers, tourists and locals alike
Universal Mind team helps Not For Tourists define what a best-of-breed travel app can be.
Challenge
The hardcopy Not For Tourists guides were created to help people navigate a city like a local. They offer a unique approach in that each guide contains highly graphical neighborhood maps, deep detail on transportation systems, tons of listings, and commentary on everything from restaurants and shopping to parks, sports stadiums, art galleries, and even governmental infrastructure. These witty, irreverent, and highly useful guides have gained a reputation for being an “insider’s guide,” pairing the latest, hippest attractions, with off-the-beaten track gems that ordinary guides miss.
Part of being indispensable means always having up-to-date content available for users. The little black NFT guidebooks are updated and printed every year, and the brand maintains a web presence as a partner to the books. In early 2009, Not For Tourists decided to make the next move that made the most sense to their on-the-go audience — mobile.
NFT knew that simply converting the guidebooks into a mobile application wouldn’t suffice. They wanted an agency partner with strong applications experience, who would also take the time to understand and embrace the brand itself, and be able to extend it into the mobile space.
Process
The team from Universal Mind got the project rolling with a hands-on discover phase appropriate to the challenge. To study the key interaction points between users and the guides, the UX team headed out into the streets of New York armed with video cameras and the New York NFT guidebook. They interviewed stakeholders, as well as locals and tourists stopped on the street. Using the data it collected, the team created personas for the primary audience members and used those as a guide for crafting the design, content and overall user experience. Each screen, scenario and interaction was generated via paper prototype, then refined, and built into a working app.
At the time the NFT app was conceived, Apple’s App Store was new. Since there was no beaten path to guide it, Universal Mind had the opportunity to define what a best-of-breed travel app could be. Plus, since the NFT brand was unique in it’s field and places great emphasis on quality and usability, the iPhone app needed to support that by bringing a creative, well-conceived and highly usable experience to market.
The testing team from Universal Mind, this time armed with iPod Touch and iPhones running the working app, followed users to see how they interacted with the app and what their experience was like. This provided invaluable insight, allowing the UX team to further refine the experience and add functionality to set the app apart. For example, users placed a high priority using the app in route to their destination — which could involve being on a subway or airplane — both network dead zones. The UX team then customized map views and embedded them into the application so that users could now use the app without needing a live data connection.
Result
The New York City edition of the app was launched in 2009 and quickly moved into the Top 10 in the App Store. It was featured by publications such as The New York Times, the LA Times, App Craver, and ZDNet, and was featured on the home page of Apple.com’s App Store page. The app also garnered an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) for excellence in user interface design. NFT apps for other cities continue to be released, including London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Paris, based on this initial model.
“The NFT app is unlike other guidebook apps that simply recycle book content with no regard to what that experience is,” says Jane Pirone, Co-founder of Not For Tourists. “This app is a completely new concept that locals and travelers both appreciate. It’s a real differentiator for us, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re tremendously excited about it.”
