City Savvy Luxembourg

overview

City Savvy Luxembourg

is a website popular among ex-pats who may be unfamiliar with things going in Luxembourg. Articles depict everything from networking events to music festivals; child daycares to pet supplies.

While studying abroad, I was lucky enough to complete my capstone with one of the best client/teacher’s I’ve ever had. The owner of City Savvy Luxembourg and LUX WMN, Amanda Roberts, designated 15 students to research current problems with City Savvy, and work towards potential solutions.

In order to find the problem points, we used:

* Field Studies
* User Interviews
* Competitive Analyses
* Surveys
* Heuristic Evaluations

Through this analysis,
we discovered two main issues among many minor problems. While City Savvy aims to promote community and connection to those in an unfamiliar country, its branding was lacking in communicating those feelings, and their website’s navigational tabs did not allow for users to intuitively explore all of the content. There was little to no marketing being done, whereas new competition was putting in ample effort. When informing our client of our findings, she felt that there was one more thing she wanted to challenge us with: an app.
While an app was not our initial response in problem finding and solving, we listened to our clients concerns and decided to challenge ourselves with this new prospect. Other event finding companies were branching out and developing apps, so why not!
We started with Branding.
Because City Savvy already has a loyal audience, we didn’t want to stray far in terms of the original colors, logo, and themes already put in place. We did brighten the colors to bring more life into the pallet as well as incorporate new shapes and designs into some of the marketing material. These new designs are reminiscent of some of the architecture in Luxembourg, and are meant to evoke feelings of familiarity while still being new and modern.
We developed new posters in accordance with the new branding, since posters are utilized as a large marketing tool in Luxembourg.
The Website
The majority of the website’s issues were based in the backend…ie it would keep crashing. Since Covid had spread worldwide by this point, we no longer were in Luxembourg and no longer had the ability to directly help City Savvy with these issues. We focused our efforts into making the overall design more streamlined as well as excluding/including more or less information.

Cleaning up the navigation bar and drop down menus were our first priority. There was so much information available and content available on the website that the majority of users had difficulties in finding what they were looking for.

We also wanted to enhance the community aspect that City Savvy was based upon. By creating an optional “Log in” feature, and a community forum, ex-pats would be able to connect with each other in a way that wasn’t available previously.

the app

For the most part, our involvement in the app was purely theoretical. Our client gave us free reign to do with it whatever we felt was needed or necessary. Since we were building this from the ground-up, a whole new team was dedicated into creating and formatting what exactly we were going to be doing. I was elected as head of the Tech Team and assisted in the production of the inspiration, UX, and UI behind the app.

Through our research, we found that there’s a general lack of knowledge about things to do in Luxembourg, from residents as well as people commuting. People don’t know that events are happening. They don’t know what to do on weekends or after work and that there might be a great place to eat right across the street.

There’s a ton of interesting and valuable content available on the current website, but when compared to similar companies, City Savvy may be providing the same value as its’ competitors who have more resources, people, and time.

Discover Lux

would be the ‘on the go’ platform that would customize the users’ experience, cultivate engagement, and adhere to the City Savvy brand. It’s about discovering what Luxembourg has to offer and building up your community around you.

We wanted to have this overarching idea of complete customization. Give the user all the tools they need to make the app their own. If you’re on the go, theres a search and filter option and navigational abilities. You can add and save anything you search for right in your map for easy access. Within these topics, you can rate and comment on places you’ve been and if that place or event as been directly mentioned in a City Savvy article, theres a direct link so that you can find out even more information.

This app plans to enhance and expand the discovery features and offer a space for community. So in addition to choosing what you want to see, City Savvy will have that curated content for you, based on the places you go to and like. Everything on the discovery page is going to be user generated content. Anyone who posts publicly could potentially end up featured on the discovery page. This is also where you’ll find your friends feed as well as pictures sorted by categories that may already exist on the City Savvy Website: ‘Community Highlights’, ‘Whats On’, ‘Places to Go’, ‘People to Meet’, etc.

Users can create their own profile to interact with the community around them, post privately so only your friends can see, or publicly. There’s also the unique ability to group together places to make all your posts, all the information more easily accessible and organized. If you go to a lot of coffee shops and take pictures at all of them, these posts can be grouped together.

marketing

In order to capitalize on this rebrand, and new app, we decided to assemble two marketing campaigns: a relaunch event and Empower an Expat.

The relaunch event would be ideal to get to know the existing users as well as gather hype around the new app. We would set up an area for guests to see live app demos as well as give them a chance to interact and explore it themselves. This would give us a chance to run usability tests, reveal flaws, and get user feedback.

We also suggested having small business pop up booths to further connect with the community.

Since our target consumers are expats, the Empower An Expat campaign would give them their own online community. We would gather stories from expats, about their lives, their acclimation to Luxembourg, and the things they enjoy doing, and display them cross-platform.

This would encourage more user generated content as well as tell a story.