Chicago Office of Tourism
The Neighborhood Express home screen.
The Express randomly drops you off at a featured Chicago neighborhood with links to explore the area.
The Picture Yourself in Chicago home screen.
Users can upload their own photos and accessorize them with various Chicago-themed items.
The photo generated can be shared with friends via email or across social networks.
Explore Chicago, the city's official tourism site, drives traffic and promotes the city’s many attractions and neighborhoods with educational, interactive activities.
Explore Chicago provides resources for visitors to experience all the city has to offer when planning a trip, including tourist attractions, neighborhoods, restaurant recommendations, travel tips and so on, as well as social media tools, web games, and other interactive activities. It was in this last category that Mightybytes was asked to create two engaging web activities in preparation for the busy 2009 summer season.
OUR APPROACH
The objectives for these activities were to foster site engagement, retain users and site ‘stickiness’, and share valuable information on city attractions and individual neighborhoods. After consulting on a half-dozen concepts for potential inclusion on the site, we finally decided on the following:
- The Neighborhood Express, a simple CTA-themed animation that randomly loads Chicago neighborhoods and gives users links to explore them.
- Picture Yourself in Chicago, an interactive activity that allows users to upload photos and create accessorized avatars that can be placed in any one of dozens of Chicago neighborhoods.
Once initial concepts were decided upon, we began sketching up interface wireframes and discussing user experience in detail. Our client at the Chicago Office of Tourism provided us with a list of neighborhoods and Chicago-centric ideas for avatar accessories, such as hats, gloves, shirts, hair, bikes, the Chicago flag, and so on. A project plan was implemented to maintain the hard and fast mid-Spring deadline with benchmarks for design reviews, supported neighborhoods, testing, and other important details.
IMPLEMENTATION
Both activities were designed from hand-drawn wireframe sketches using Illustrator and Photoshop, then built in Flash and tested across multiple browsers and platforms to ensure feature parity. These activities are also completely 508-compliant so users with disabilities can enjoy them as well.
THE RETURN
Picture Yourself in Chicago has generated thousands of neighborhood-branded photos shared across dozens of social networks and other online locations. It was also the recipient of a 2009 W3 Award from the International Academy of Visual Arts.