Supporting experience-sharing and a common culture
To start, different stakeholders from Grand Paris Seine et Oise are brought together for a workshop we prepare. The goal is to share the tourism and cultural offers they manage (services, visitor types) as well as expectations around the future OTI (inter-municipal Tourist Office) and the potential contributions to the collective.
While preparing the workshop, we create sheets for each cultural and tourism offer present in the territory. We invite participants to share out the sheets, filling in the strengths and weaknesses as well as the issues encountered and the target audience. Pooling them lets the team take stock of the common points, the differences, and also of each one’s benefits and challenges. It’s the first step in building a shared reference.
Understanding who the future OTI's users are
A brainstorming session on the target users is organised to co-build proto-personae.
The inter-municipal Tourist Office is a new entity sitting within an existing ecosystem in which different visitor types coexist. So, in a second step, we organise a collaborative working session to surface common behavioural variables, building on each person’s domain knowledge. The work is done individually before being pooled. Broad categories are identified and translated into behavioural variables. After surfacing the different patterns tied to these variables, 4 proto-personae take shape more sharply: The local ambassador, The neighbour from the territory, The urban backpacker and The passing wanderer.
How can the tourist experience be made smoother?
Thinking about the visitor journey in the local area lets the participants map opportunities and turn them into improvement ideas.
Now that we know who we are addressing, it’s relevant to re-contextualise the experience through the different steps of the visitor journey. To frame the thinking, we propose a simple breakdown of the journey going from discovery to after the visit. At each step, the actions and needs associated with each proto-persona are identified. The strengths and weaknesses of the ecosystem are set side by side to surface a list of opportunities classified by type of lever (marketing and offer, communication or organisational).
Co-defining the services
To move beyond strict ideation and start sketching solutions, we invite participants to choose 4 previously identified opportunities to detail.
Working groups are organised based on affinity with the themes to tackle. Each solution is then described in its workings, the technical and human needs it requires, or examples to help people envisage the solution. Finally, we use the Kano Model to prioritise the directions considered, identifying the added value from the tourists’ point of view.
Innovative and 'common-sense' contributions that allowed us to move forward collectively, despite the disparity of each stakeholder's realities and expectations. Special mention for the remote workshop facilitation, a challenge met thanks to the team's listening skills, inventiveness and adaptability.