Summary
The 'Tudu' (to do) list is a tool to create and update lists of places you’ve been to or want to go to, with the possibility to add personal notes to each place, as well as ratings that don’t affect the places’ overall ratings. You can make each list public or private, then share your public lists with anyone you like, regardless of whether they have Tudu accounts or not.
I designed the Tudu list and managed its production and rollout activities. While I’ll give you a general overview of the problem space and ideation process, I’m only going to take you through some aspects of designing the responsive web app and of features that are live at the time I write this case study. Or, if you prefer, you could just head to www.whatstudu.com to create your list now. But please bear in mind that not all you’ll see is on the live website is true-to-design.
Introduction
Whatstudu.com is a child of the cool and popular Instagram page @ToDoToronto. The startup was originally created as a one-stop shop for things to do in Toronto. The idea was that local influencers would use the platform to create and share itineraries of activities and cool places to check out in the city. And then the pandemic happened.
Problem space
The stay-at-home orders created two main issues:
On one hand, nobody was going anywhere, so no new content was being created on the website, even after correcting some usability and accessibility issues flagged by users and identified via a heuristic evaluation of the site.
On the other hand, our business partners, mostly eateries that our users had added to their itineraries, were hanging by a thread. We wanted to help them. Even though dining-in had been shut down, most were still open for takeout and delivery. How could we use our platform to drive more business to them?
Ideation
The first idea to remedy the latter issue was to invite some influencers to simply create and share lists of their favourite eateries to order takeout and delivery from. But were we going to strip down our beloved itinerary feature to turn into a simple list?
Meanwhile, we were completing a round of user research and one important piece of feedback we got from the 12 users we interviewed was that they needed a bookmark feature to save interesting places they saw while browsing posted itineraries.
The first thing I did with the new information was to pull out two of our personas — Joe-Anne and Mikhail — and update them to reflect the new needs.
As we continued to brainstorm the kind of product we needed to create, we assumed that we wouldn’t be locked down for ever: people would eventually start going out again. Therefore, the new product needed to be useful in pandemic and post-pandemic worlds.
The concept
Currently, the Tudu List has 7 main features:
Adding places: we integrated a Google API into our platform which allows you to add any place that’s listed on Google — anywhere in the world! You can also add as many places as you'd like to a list.
Marking places as “visited” or if it’s an eatery (our system will recognize it) as “had takeout” because visiting a restaurant and only having takeout from it are two totally different experiences.
Filtering and sorting tools to help you easily find places within a list i.e., places you haven’t yet visited or arranging your list by date added.
Personal notes and rating: you may add a custom note to any place you’ve added whether you’ve visited or not i.e., to remind of something you enjoyed or something a friend recommended. You may also rate each place out of 5 stars.
Multiple lists: you may create more than one list and add the same place to all of your lists if you want to.
Public and private lists: you may set any list as private, meaning that only you will be able to see it, even when you share your profile with your friends.
Sharing: it shares your Tudu profile showing all the lists you’ve set to public.
Like I mentioned earlier, these are only the features that are live now. Many more are in the works.
To learn more about how the Tudu List works, please head to www.whatstudu.com to start creating your list today. It's free! On the other hand, you're more than welcome to reach out to me for more details about the ideation and design process.
Thanks for stopping by!