Based on statistics of our website and social media, we found out that tourism topic was very popular among our audience. Moreover, one of our partners was a domestic tourism organization. Therefore, we decided to make a special project dedicated to tourism in Moscow suburb.

In terms of users, our goals were to create such a website that:
● Will contain information that will be interesting for our users
● Will open new places for “spoiled” by Moscow sights users
● Will be useful for trip planning

In terms of business purposes, this website should be:
● well-visited
● Well-read
● scrolled to the end of pages

Since we were an information agency, we had very diverse audience with very different background, jobs etc., we only knew the age diapason and men/women ratio. The only common things were that they lived in Moscow region and read journalistic media. Therefore, it was not possible to separate all the people into several types, or personas.
Although UX-methods mostly are not in use in journalistic sphere, the approach we eventually used were very similar to JTBD. We defined and prioritized most frequent "touristic” needs of our users based on the data our SMM team had collected (for us, SMM team played the same role as a technical support team plays for other services). Basically, we knew that our users wanted:

● To spend good time on holiday somewhere not so far away from home (and not so expensive)
● To spend good time with different companies (with their friends or families or along)
● To get new impressions, change the environment after a working week
● To make some sport

Based on the data received from our SMM team, we formulated 4 user stories:

● When preparing for a holiday trip, users can see a sightseeing list of Moscow suburb so they could choose something that suit their requirements (money, travel time, way of travel etc.)
● When preparing for a holiday, users can find places to go based on their company, so they not to feel not at ease
● When travelling in Moscow suburb, users are able to get new impressions, so they can feel their their life more colorful
● When travelling in Moscow suburb, users are able to make sport, so they could spend time more energetically

Based on these stories, we elaborated several features:

Based on these features, we created a website structure.

After agreement on content (where to use text, photos, maps, pop-ups etc.), we started to create a website.

Since we did not have developers for this purpose, we, designers, made everything ourselves in a site constructor “Tilda” or “Readymag”. There was no need to create a design from scratch, therefore for this website we didn’t use Figma. What to UI, the visual style of our website was based on corporate identity of our partner, this was the condition of cooperation.

The first page is an interactive map of Moscow region that shows all the locations. It also makes the process of page study more entertaining.

After clicking on each button, user goes to a separate page dedicated to a particular city.

Sometimes it is not that easy to find a place to spend some nights in the Moscow suburb, because not all the hotels could be found in the Booking.com or other aggregators, so we decided to help with hotel search.

New tasty food could also be a new impression, plus this topic was also pretty popular among our readers, so we decided to show all “tasty” places in the city.

We knew that some our users like not only to travel but also to post photos from those places. For such users we prepared a block about city “photo zones”.

For sports people, we prepared a block about active rest.

To emphasize the uniqueness of a city, we created a block dedicated to particular souvenirs.

Among our audience there were families with children, so we created a block about rest with children.

Since among our audience there were absolutely different types of people in terms of wealth and way of life, we showed all the possible ways to get these places – by personal or public transport.

In order to get feedback from users, we added a feedback form.

After launch of the project, we found out that very often users left pages of not so “touristic” places after several “scrolls”. Therefore, we decided to try to stop this tendency. We added a new block “3 reasons to visit *name of city*” (such technique works pretty well in article naming).

After this change the average time spent on the page has increased.

Success of this special project were measured by several measures:
● number of users
● time spent on pages
● extent of scrolling
● quality of feedback

In terms of numbers, it was quite good, on average it was 6 538 unique users and 18 378 views per month.

What’s to feedback, by all the comments we could make a conclusion that we have created a pretty useful product (and actually, some people in our office used this service as well when preparing for holidays).