Sightseer

Key Screens
User Personas
Style Guide
User Flow

1. What is the problem your solution addresses?

According to Statista, tourism contributed roughly $5.8 trillion USD to the global economy in 2021. But how much of this contribution cycles through local communities? The United Nations Environmental Programme has found that for every $100 spent by a tourist, only $5 stays within the local economy. Majority of this money flows into the pockets of large corporations, who use these funds to continue gentrifying and changing the native landscape to appeal to tourists. As popular destinations continue to cater to short-term visitors, the locals are pushed aside as their history is erased away. As many developing countries depend on tourism as the backbone of their economy, it is necessary that we begin correcting this uneven distribution of wealth. We believe that it’s time to start bringing attention back to local communities and small business owners. We believe that it’s time we start giving back to the locals.

2. Why did you pick this solution and how does it address the problem?

In order to give back to the locals, we needed to create a way for locals to gain passive income. Hence, the birth of Sightseer. With Sightseer, locals can post curated tours based on their knowledge as a native. Each tour would retail for around $10 to $20 and upon purchase, tourists would be able to guide themselves along the provided route at their own pace. As a tourist, you’re visiting someone else’s home town – what better way to get around than with a local friend at a low price point? As locals create these tours, they could even lead tourists through their own small-businesses or family owned restaurants. With this solution tourists are gaining a unique experience, and locals are gaining passive income with the potential to boost their existing earnings. Join Sightseer today, and explore the world through the eyes of a local.

3. 💡 Inspiration

Our inspiration for Sightseer came from our recent spring break trips and general life experiences. Maciej is an international student from Poland, Kimberly visited Mexico, and Ellie visited Iceland. Through these experiences we found that many communities were not seeing the full economic benefit of tourism, and that finding local experiences required hours of research on travel blogs or forums. We chose to combat both issues with one solution: Sightseer. Locals will have the opportunity to curate tours while earning passive income, and tourists will gain unique experiences that they wouldn’t have found elsewhere.

4. 👩🏻‍💻 How we built it

We initially began by brainstorming ideas for each of the three categories, and narrowed them down by the prevalence of the issue that they each addressed. We chose Sightseer, as economic disparity caused by tourism is a global issue that every tourist has played a part in. Once we settled on an idea we established three user flows to feature, and began working on our user personas. From our insights we created our style guide and final screens.

5. 🐛 Challenges we ran into

Members of our team had different amounts of experience with Figma and design in general. However, the most challenging part of this designathon was the time frame. Two days is a very small window to coordinate with a new team and create a user journey. At the end of the day, we all had a great time and we are extremely proud of the work that we’ve accomplished.

6. 👏 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of being able to include most of the features we ideated for this project and being able to do it in this incredibly short amount of time. Getting the prototype to be fully functional was also a big win for us.

7. 🌎 What's next for Sightseer

Some functions we hope to add in the future include tour sharing and travel journal functions. We think it would be great for users to be able to share their tours with their group and even make small notes or attach photos to each of their tour stops.