Project 32: (Re)design an Experience - Visit Indiana and Visit Indianapolis
Jake Nolan and I decided to team up for this project. We grew up together in a small town in Indiana. I can speak for myself and say that I always romanticized the thought of leaving and escaping the corn fields. But now that I’m a bit older and have lived in a couple of different states, I have a strong pride in where I am from.
For this (re)design, we decided to focus on redesigning the experience of visitindiana.com and visitindy.com. Although we have interaction gifs, we truly wanted to focus on creating a novel user-experience that is both fun and compelling.
The problems we have with the current order of things on visitindiana.com and visitindy.com are:
The pages don’t have a narrative
The pages overwhelm with content
The packaging of the two sites are totally different - visitindiana.com is clearly focused on an older audience that a wholesome, relaxing long-weekend; while visitindy.com has an energetic color scheme and highlights breweries and racing which sounds good to someone my age (in their mid-20s).
And as a final note, the experience overall just isn’t that compelling or special for either site.
As part of the solution for this (re)design, we wanted to create a novel experience around how to discover a city/state/etc. and what it has to offer. When you first land on visitindiana.com, you are confronted with this prompt, “[Sometime] I’m looking forward to [activity]. This statement prompts the user to pick time frame and activity type to give them the my personalized result possible. In the case of the example, the user wanted to spend their weekend hiking. Because of this input, the background image, weather forecast, and CTA all reference Ft. Harrison State Park - the perfect place for some weekend hiking.
But say that the user isn’t quite sure what they want to do or when they want to do it, then if they scroll below the main statement, there’s a section asking, “At a Loss?”. This section has several scrubbers that allow the user to push and pull between different extremes to define their ideal trip. The user’s decisive placement of the scrubbers dictate the result, which will display the most compatible answer and then showcase a few related options.
Main Prompt - Selection State
Once the user has started to focus their search a bit, they might visit a city-specific page, such as visitindy.com. Once on the city page, the user is no longer confronted with a prompt because knowing the place they want explore is half of the battle. Now, they are given a carousel of events happening around town. Or, similar to the statewide page, the user can take advantage of the scrubbers below the main section to refine their search for the perfect activity happing in that city.
Expanded Primary Navigation
Jake and I thought it was silly for a state and its cities/regions to have disjointed tourism portals, branding, and altogether experiences. When you think of a vacation destination, Indiana is probably the last state on your mind, so it needs all the help it can get.
We decided to use a single style guide throughout all the state/city pages. The color scheme comes from the Indiana state flag and the type choices were meant to be interpreted as both traditional, but also on-trend to appeal to audiences both young and old. The charismatic iconography (which we did not design, but graciously borrowed from The Noun Project) can also be seen in two lights - simple, clear and fun, light-hearted. Between the color, type, and icons, these design elements reinforce the idea of form meeting function and this site being extremely functional, but also really fun to look at and interact with.
We hope y’all enjoyed reading and thanks for your time!