Al Ula App | A case study

5 min readMar 14, 2021

The Brief

This is the third project in our UX/UI immersive boot camp at Misk Academy. I worked on this project with the team remotely. We were assigned this project to design a solution for Al Ula tourism.

This project would include User research, persona, brand guideline, business analysis which include (C&C analysis, business&user needs, and Leaf diagram), information architecture which includes (Heuristic evaluation, and task flow), main features, wireframing, and prototyping.

The team: Reham Alsuhaimi, Manal Saleh and Zahraa Nadhem.

Project Duration: Two weeks

Tools: Miro, Figma.

About Al Ula

Al Ula is home to a series of fascinating historical and archaeological sites such as ancient Dadan, the capital of the Dadan and Lihyan kingdoms that trace more than 200,000 years of human history. Today, work is underway to transform Al Ula into one of the world’s premier and tourism destinations for nature, culture, and heritage.

Project plan

On the first day of this project, my team and I started a conversation to know about ourselves, we talked about our strong and weak points to complete each other during work. After then we started to define our project plan, as you can see in figure 1.1

User Research

As a first step, we worked on interviews and surveys in user research to understand the users. First, we prepared some questions about Al Ula, heritage, experience, trip planning, and local tourism. We could make 9 interviews and collect 11 responses from the survey.

Questions “ the important “

What is the most historical thing that interests you?
How do you plan for your trip?
Which is the most difficult thing you’re facing when you plan for the trip?
How to get the information about the city you’ll visit?
ِAre you interested in the history and heritage of Saudi Arabia?
Would you like to visit Al Ula?
What do you know about Al Ula?
Describe Al Ula in a word!

From our user’s interviews and responses, we were able to create our affinity mapping in figure 1.2

Insights

People are interested in visiting Al-Ula, But find struggle finding pieces of information.
Most of the people/users knew about Al-Ula from influencers.
Most people plan to use social media and other trip booking apps.
There is high interest in Saudi local tourism.
Al-Ula became a public interest for many people worldwide.

Problem Statement

Since Al-Ula became the attraction of many tourists, people attempting to visit found many struggles finding pieces of information about it. Our solution should deliver an app that will help users to experience Al-Ula.

Persona

So, based on user research we formed the following persona in figure 11.

Brand Gridline

After then, to start design we defined brand guideline that reflects Al Ula identity.

Business Analysis

Insights

Explore Dubai has a great map view. You can find the nearest event around you also has filter interest.
Airbnb proved online experience.
Japan endless has a best practice traveler information.
Go turkey has the best blog form.
Explore Dubai is well detailed in exploring activities.

Buisiness & User needs:

Lena has some needs to reach her goals as:

Informative enough.
Clear Details.
Others Experience.
Booking Options.

Also the business need:

Gain more customer.
Build trust between the customer and the owner.
Increase funds.

Information Architecture

Our Soultion

We decided to create a mobile application as most of our users prefer a applications as their platform choice to view photos and search information better.