Table of Contents

What are the set of problems implied by the starting HMW?

Who cares about each problem and how important is the problem? (Stakeholders)

Building Context on Problem and Solution Space

Primary Research List as Target Interviewees

Working Together We Hope To...

Tools

What are the set of problems implied by the HMW?

The initial HMW was, How might we create a sense of community between travelers and
local cultures. Based on this, some of the initial problems we discussed initially during our
laddering-up-laddering-down process were:

1. What do people care about before and as they are planning their travel?
2. What would make people have a better travel experience with respect to both tourists
and locals?
3. Do people care about the food, people and culture of where they visit and if so why?
4. Do locals feel that their homes and cities are being affected by tourists or there is no
preservation of local culture?
5. How do we ensure improved economic activity for all parties involved?
6. How do visitors and locals feel both welcome and safe in these situations?
7. What is the impact of biases, stereotypes and respect?
8. Do people have time during their trips to care about creating this sense of community?
9. Do people feel like they have a lack of network while travelling or that language might be
a barrier in creating these relationships?
10. How important are travellers personal interests in fostering better relationships?
11. Do people think that building such activities is expensive both in terms of time and
money?

Based on the above, we landed on the final HMW of How might we provide travelers with
unique and rich on-the-ground experiences? Throughout interviews, we recognized there
was a common theme amongst interviewees that there was a lack of information when they
were actually on-site at the tourist destination.

There were plenty of information that was helpful before the trip, but not as many options for
when they were actually at the destination. Additionally, for interviewees who choose not to use
guided tours or audio tours, the only way they could find more information when on site were
through small information placards or Googling information on the fly. The former provided little
detail or color as to what took place and the historical significance. The latter was not well
integrated with the interviewees preferred flow as they navigate through the tourist sites and
tended to detract from the experience.
Who cares about each problem and how important is the
problem? (Stakeholders)

No. Stakeholders How Important is the problem to

them?

1 People thinking of going on a trip or planning one Nice to have

2 People who help in trip planning (travel Nice to have

consultants)

3 People who are currently in the middle of the trip Need to have

4 Locals who are in the industry as tour guides / Competition

operators

5 Locals who live in the country and are affected by Nice to have
tourism

Building Context on Problem and Solution Space

There are multiple resources at our disposal to gain better context on the problem space. Based
on our initial meetings and individual profiles, all of us share a common strand in terms of our
love for travel. We have all been through various situations and experiences and hope to
leverage our own knowledge as much as we can.

However, our primary source of gathering knowledge will be through our user interviews. We
will try to target and selectively pick interviewees who will help us further refine our HMW and
eventually our solution. Our aim is to seek out various stakeholders and people ideally in the
Early Adopter section of our user growth curve so that we get an early handle if were doing
something wrong.

Whats more crucial is all of our secondary research. Billions of people travel every year and
they take advantage of various resources and websites as they plan their trips. Be they flawed
or perfect, wed like to walk a mile in our users shoes and understand their motivations behind
their choices. In addition, we hope to research industry trends and user studies around travel
and creating travel ecosystems.

All of the above will be in a constant state of flux and we hope this document to be a working
model of where we are at any point in time. We will capture regular snapshots of this document,
especially after group planning exercises and re-vamps of this document to accurately depict
our flow as a team.

Our next step is to identify specific sources of secondary research that we would like to
look into as a group.
Primary Research List as Target Interviewees
We hope to begin segmenting our target interviewees based on their experience with travel and
the travel industry. As indicated above, we hope to look at,

1. People thinking of going on a trip or planning one

2. People who help in trip planning (travel consultants)
3. People who are currently in the middle of the trip
4. Locals who are in the industry as tour guides / operators
5. Locals who live in the country and are affected by tourism

We further hope to segment on other metrics such as

1. How long ago they might have undertaken a trip.
2. Age
3. Industries / Functions
4. Etc

By pre-identifying our targets ahead of schedule, well be able to better plan for how we wish to
interview them. However, we would like to keep this list flexible as insights from previous
interviews might change our interview strategies as they evolve. As expected, we believe this
section will constantly evolve as we progress through the next 7-8 weeks.

Working Together We Hope To...

Reframe our original HMW every week for the first 3-4 weeks. We believe our weekly
interviews combined with any secondary research will deeply influence the direction of
our project and were excited to see the trajectory on which our research takes us.
An add-on of refining our HMW is alo understanding the problem space better. To
achieve this, we would like to use a Dump and Sort exercise every week to best share
our interview and research experiences and look for common patterns.
We would also like to form a common interview guide starting with Week 4/5 so that we
are all asking the same questions. Our aim is to avoid asking any leading / embedded
questions and to involve our users by asking them to paint a picture of their experiences.
At the end of 7 weeks we hope to have a fleshed out wireframe design / visual prototype
ready as a working prototype might be beyond the scope of this period. However, as we
continue to refine our ideas, the above might change.
We will continue to add to this section over the next few weeks.

Tools
Diverge-Converge Tool 1 - Laddering Up and Down - Used Week 3
Diverge-Converge Tool 2 - Mashups
Interview Sharing - Dump and Sort
Idea clustering
Journey maps
Storyboards
Business model canvas