TapYourMap – 2016 – gl.lorenz – Interaction Designer / MBA

TapYourMap – Travel app

What is it about?

TapYouMap.com is a digital scratch-map. It’s easy to update, it doesn’t get bleached hanging on the wall and it will calculate your travel statistics automatically.

Check your visited cities in www.TapYourMap.com and keep track of your trips.

No matter if you’re a family-holiday person, a globetrotter or a businessman, you can check-in TapYourMap all the cities you’ve been to.

Keep track of your travel statistics, check your friends’ activities and plan your next trip @tapyourmap

My role

Co-Founder. UX designer.

Activities and responsibilities

I was the responsible of the product design. My partner was experienced in the technical requirements, so he was managing the development team (which we outsourced) and I was in charged of the following areas:

Branding and visual design

Design of the name, logo and different visual assets.
Corporative communication.
Branding guidelines.

Marketing

Community management. Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Content generation. Visual and written content for social networks.
Media marketing campaigns.

Product Management

Understanding our market needs.
Shaping a solution addressing our customers’ and users’ needs.
Defining the vision and mission for our product.
Prioritising our product features and developing an MVP.
Defining the technology to develop the MVP.

How it works

Digital scratch-map

The users create an account with their Facebook login and start checking-in the cities they’ve been to.

The website was created for touch devices, targeting mobile phones and tablets. Back in 2016 this approach was quite a new one.

The users interact with the map by tapping in each country. When the user has checked-in a certain city in a country, this country becomes “visited” (coloured).

By tapping in a country the user can either check-in a city or view the visited cities of that country.

Travelling community

The users are part of a community by adding contacts as friends. They can share their location and find other friends in the same place, they can plan trips together and add countries to a wish list. They can then find out which friends would like to visit the same countries.

MVP

The MVP was developed as a website, with its technical limitations.

As a follow up step Android and iOS application were going to be developed. Unfortunately due to other priorities this project was rereleased after building the MVP and acquiring followers in social media.

Start small. Develop the product with little money and key features.

Key learnings

As one of my first projects working together with a more experienced entrepreneur, the learnings were many:

Outsourcing. Strategic partners are key. The technical aspects must be managed by an internal partner.
Social media. Communication in social media is key to build up the product’s image and bring users traffic to the website.
Roadmap. It’s important to identify what the core features of the product are, and to develop these with high priority.
Monetise. A good strategy to monetised he product and start pursuing revenues is key to survive, specially in self-financed projects.

Any thoughts on this? Have you done something similar? Any ideas of how to improve it and make a bigger impact? Let’s talk about it!

Contact me