We worked with Lonely Planet on a radical rethink of their mobile city guides

In 2009 Lonely Planet had primarily repurposed their guides into mobile apps, without understanding the unique opportunities offered by these personal, ubiquitous and location aware devices.

When they released their API, we saw an opportunity and we approached them with a couple of exciting ideas in mind.

One of the features we always loved about Lonely Planet guides was the itineraries: you seldom have time to plan your trip and browsing the sections of the book you can always refer to the itineraries box, highlighting the best itineraries for 2, 3, 7 days or two weeks. We were surprised to find this feature missing in their app, which included a limited bookmarking feature only.

Another key insight was bringing the time dimension in by allowing people to plan their visit according to musical/art/theatre tastes: after all, it’s common for many people travel to another country specifically to attend to a particular festival or art event.

With this in mind, we created design principles, information architecture and an interactive prototype showing the opportunities offered by our concept.