I Love Jaisalmer, an NGO came to us with the challenge to promote Jaisalmer Desert Festival and increase tourist footfall in the city.
As a result, ‘Maru Mela’ (a sub-event under Jaislamer Desert Festival) was born to empower the local community and give them an opportunity to present their culture, heritage and food in its most authentic form through one of their kind immersive experiences organised by ILJ.
Thus arose the need for a microsite (linked to the ILJ website) to promote Maru Mela and also enable tourists to book the above mentioned local food and cultural experiences.
User Personas
We borrowed the personas from our Design Thinking Sessions while Designing Maru Mela as they were the primary audience for the website. Based on those 4 personas we came up with one broader User profile for the end user and added another stakeholder profile for the ILJ backend team looking after the bookings.
Existing User Journey
The first step was to understand the existing user Journey and gather pain points from the offline booking experience provided by I Love Jaisalmer for similar events in the past. Based on our personas, we highlighted the pain points we wanted to solve, both for the user and the other stakeholders in the system.
The Challenges to be addressed were
- Lack of a single point of verified information
- Long wait period to get information/make bookings
- Lots of Back and forth to make/modify bookings
- Lack of dedicated information helpline
- Manual errors in making bookings over call
- Lack of manpower at the Booking helpline
New User Journey
Elaborating on the possible User scenarios we mapped out the Experience booking journey for the end user and further implemented it into a detailed information architecture for the microsite.
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Based on the information architecture, low fidelity wireframes were created to further understand the user flow.
The Result
The final outcome was a microsite with HTM, Vue, API integration that acted as the One stop solution for the end user for all their information and booking related needs regarding Maru Mela.
We also solved for our other stakeholder – ILJ backend team, by using Airtable to make the population/modification of the event information extremely user friendly and efficient. It also stored the user data eliminating the need to go back and forth between platforms.
