Vonder is a platform and marketplace for creating, purchasing, and consuming digital content that augments real-life tour experiences. Creators build tours with voice narration, mapping, and more for each point of interest along their tour. Listeners can browse, purchase, and experience tours at their own pace–anytime, anywhere.
The Need
It's the height of the pandemic, and physical proximity to humans outside of your COVID bubble sounds downright masochistic. But you have to get out of the house and experience the world beyond your four walls, else you're liable to lose your marbles.
Such was the environment in which Vonder was born–a way to scale the idea of IRL physical tours beyond the limitations of appointments and physical meet-ups with a tour guide and *shudders* other strangers.
Even in a post-pandemic world, there remains incredible appeal for the instant gratification that comes from discovering a well-rated tour right in your own back yard, buying it now for a fraction of the cost of a traditional tour ticket, and heading to the first point of interest at your leisure without the hassle of booking an appointment at the tour guide's convenience rather than yours.
Challenges
Camber needed to create an entirely mobile-centric experience for both tour creators and consumers, all in one app. Our challenge was to take a fairly involved process of creating complex digital tour experiences and maintaining a library of them in a live digital marketplace and make it feel as effortless as possible.
On the flip side, it also had to offer a fun, repeat-worthy experience for consumers to discover, purchase, and consume tours.
Our Role
Camber had the honor of working directly with the visionary founder behind Vonder from first inception of the idea. Through our iterative process, we progressed through our Feature Value Framework to hone in on what a Minimum Delightful Product could be, and how we could take small, iterative steps that allowed us to test our assumptions along the way.
The Skateboard Method at Work
The vision for Vonder's Minimum Delightful Product came to life through four main iterations:
Prototype
We started with a no-code clickable prototype with high fidelity design that illustrated what one critical user journey through the app might look like: a tour consumer progressing through points of interest on a tour, comprising map-based navigation, audio narration, and other accompanying multimedia content for each point of interest, or "tour stop."
Proof-of-Concept
We then developed a fully native proof of concept mobile app with a single, pre-loaded tour, and distributed it privately to a group of testers to try out the real tour experience, this time with real-life points of interest and tour content–including high-quality audio narration.
Alpha
With a proof-of-concept of the tour consumer experience under our belts, we needed to do the same for tour creators. Next we built an in-app experience for content creators to create and edit tours, complete with high level tour "listing page" information and granular details of each tour stop's exact GPS location, audio recording and file upload options, and even drag-and-drop reordering of tour stops.
MDP
The final piece of the puzzle for our Vonder MDP was connecting buyers and sellers with marketplace features like listing tours for sale, searching and discovering listed tours by location and other factors, and in-app purchase to add tours to a listener's library.
Vonder is available in limited market areas. Visit Vonder.tours for info.
