Lonely Planet Operating System
2011
User Interface Design
An interface to Lonely Planet's revolutionary product-agnostic publishing system for authors, editors and product producers to work.
- Lonely Planet Operating System
- Lonely Planet has been trying to build a content platform to underpin publishing to mixed media for the better part of a decade. In 2010, with the publication of the Colorado guide that dream was realised, with authors on the road writing descriptive text and point of interest reviews directly into the publishing system and editors "curating" a guide from it.As awesome as this was, writing POI reviews and narrative text separately raised another problem: it had become difficult for authors and editors to maintain a sense context. Authors had lost the sense that they were creating a "thing", feeling their job had become simply feeding words into the maw of the machine. And without a sense of the relationship between geography, description and reviews, it became surprisingly easy to repeat or even contradict yourself.Finally, although the publication of Colorado was an important proof point for the system, product curation required commissioning editors to learn and write XML, a hurdle would need to be removed before any full-scale transition to "L.P.O.S." as the default publishing platform for the business.
- Concept
- Execution
- This let us do a lot of pretty sweet things we couldn't do before. As an author in the system, I can see exactly how many Italian restaurants I've reviewed in Melbourne and where. I can see if I've said Lygon St is great for espresso but forgotten to include more than a couple of cafés. More interesting still, I can find which hotels offer airport transfers by searching for 'airport' in the reviews of 'Sleeping' POIs.With so much ground covered on the common problems of discoverability, geographical and narrative contexts, the focus shifts to building out specific 'views' of the tool that are tailored to specific users. Authors need to feel like they're not doing data entry or they'll never find themselves in the flow state that lets them write their best stuff. Editors need to read from start to finish, check cross references and make changes on the fly. Product curators need to be able to sift through a literal world of content and curate a new product — be it book, app, web page or eBook — without touching a line of XML.Putting the tools in the hands of executives for an hour let them experience the ease and fun of product curation; a visceral demonstration which not only helped secure funding for the next round of development, but the confidence to green light a platform transformation that we'd been attempting as an organisation for the better part of a decade. The first of Lonely Planet's flagship titles will be built off of the LP Operating System in early 2012.
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The iPhone City Guides are Lonely Planet's flagship iOS products, providing travellers with offline mapping with GPS awareness alongside a famously down-to-earth knack for helping travellers discover the heart of a destination.iPhone app, User Interface Design, Graphic Design2011 -
Lonely Planet's Audio Walking Tours take travellers on neighbourhood walking tours. The experience is brought to life by voice actors and historical audio footage from the BBC Audio Archive, with guidance courtesy of GPS-enabled, offline city maps.iPhone app, User Interface Design, Art Direction2011 -
A competition aimed at increasing brand awareness and consumer engagement, without losing our souls or hurting users.User Interface Design, Experience Design2011 -
Lonely Planet’s 1,000 Experiences for iPad application sought to find a new metaphor for the coffee table book experience.
In five short weeks, we took an application from concept to App Store, recasting the book as an interactive deck of cards. We worked in strict isolation, with a new team and under considerable pressure. I was responsible for co-developing the product concept, pitching it to (and later managing the expectations of) the projects executive-level stakeholders, designing and assisting to optimise the UI implementation.User Interface Design, Graphic Design, Art Direction2011 -
A new site for boutique Australian frame builder, Baum Cycles.Copywriting, Web Design, Art Direction2011
