Cooper Design Challenge

I took a stab at Cooper's Design Challenge and it was pretty fun! I was especially excited about Part 2 - designing a tourist service in popular tourist destinations. I also found it a bit more challenging since Part 1, on the other hand, was to redesign the Insert/Format table ribbon feature in Microsoft Word. I being very familiar with the feature, having worked on Ribbon Hero -- a concept test at Office Labs seeing whether we can use games to help people learn about features in the Office ribbon to increase their productivity -- and just using the Office suite probably more frequently than some people, Part 1 one was a lot more 'straight forward'.

The recommended number of hours to spend on the exercises was 1 and 2 hours respectively. LocalGuide also had a 60+ page interviews which I only went through 3 interviews. The interviews were really interesting though! If you're into reading about what people do when they travel, it's pretty insightful. I forgot about the people who traveled with children and I wasn't sure whether tour books were still popular among people -- I love tour books myself, embarrassingly, especially the ones with a ton of pictures :)

My design for the LocalGuide was purposefully unrealistic. I came to a form factor that just excited me and have been wanting to design for awhile so I just took a stab at it. There are a lot of issues that I didn't resolve at the end of the exercise and perhaps I will resolve as days go by and they haunt me in my dreams ;)

Here's the instructions to the design challenge: Cooper Design Challenge
Click for the slideshow of my design process: