EXCEPTIONAL ALIEN

A seamless, engaging travel tool for inspired travellers to connect with creative communities worldwide.

Overview:Exceptional ALIEN is a travel platform designed to inspire creative travellers through recommendations shared by renowned creatives worldwide. When they approached us, they were in the early stages of development. Their brief focused on two core goals: delivering an elevated product experience that would captivate a growing audience, and exploring the roadmap for future-state rollout.
Task:Create an app that reflects a simpler and more engaging experience of their content and product offering. This included exploration of a proof of concept to future state rollout.
Problem:Exceptional ALIEN required the app to provide a elevated product experience to their website platform in order to consolidate further rounds of investment as well as expand their value proposition to a growing audience.

Type:
Mobile Application
Sector:
Travel
Role: Strategy, Competitor & Comparative Analysis, Ideation, Low-fidelity Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability & Concept Testing, Project Management
Time: 12 Weeks
Webiste:
https://www.exceptionalalien.com/

Brief Revision & Client Focus

Before diving into discovery, our strategy team led a revisionist workshop to reassess the brief—aiming to clarify the value proposition and better align with the product scope already outlined by Exceptional ALIEN’s internal marketing and design teams. A key insight shared with our product and development team was the concern around sustaining high-value content creation at scale. With this in mind, the design team and I factored scalability into our early thinking for the product’s future state. To the right are our initial PR impressions ahead of discovery and ideation.

Problem Statement #1
Focus: Travel Tool

Travellers seek genuine connection and a sense of community wherever they go—but often struggle to find it, as their time is consumed by planning and logistics.

Problem Statement #2 Focus: Community Generation

Travellers often discover hidden gems around the world—but they’re more inclined to protect these spots than share them widely.

Research & Persona Mapping

We identified six distinct users for Exceptional ALIEN:

Anna THE LEISURLIST
Elisa THE CREATIVE FOLLOWER
Daniel THE BUCKET LISTER
Liyah THE CREATIVE CAREERIST
Raheem THE RE-CONFIGURER
Callum THE WORTHY TRAVELLER

These personas highlighted key traveller types aligned with Exceptional ALIEN’s value proposition—each defined by values like transformative learning, community connection, reimagined experiences, and creative inspiration. They guided our strategy and ideation for the travel tool and its community-building arcs.

A two pronged approach:
Our HMW’s

Our "How Might We" statements focused on two goals: creating a seamless travel tool for launch to support EA’s next investment round, and exploring solutions for managing future content scalability.

HMW #1
Focus: Travel Tool

How might we deliver an engaging, inspiring experience that motivates EA users to explore locally and abroad—while minimizing the effort required to plan their travel?

HMW #2 Focus: Community Generation

How might we design a sustainable community growth model for Exceptional ALIEN that reduces content effort over time while preserving its core value of high-quality recommendations and travel inspiration?

Framing Ideation:
Theme Hierarchy

Our findings revealed Community and Inspiration as the two dominant themes across personas and insights. Recognizing community’s power to shape perspective, we prioritized these themes to guide ideation. This hierarchy aligned with the brief’s dual aims: building a bespoke travel tool for inspiration and designing for future community-driven scalability to ease content demands.

Ideation: All Encompassing

These themes allowed us to define keys areas of ideation that would resonate with our findings. They were:

Community
Utility
Personalisation
Inspiration

With Community and Inspiration being the driving themes to ideate from, it was from here that we hoped to create a transformaive learning experience that would connect and inspire users.

North Star: Community Driven Platform

Our ideation addressed core themes—community, inspiration, and learning—by designing a tool that offered curated suggestions and enabled users to connect with one another. By embracing the value of collective insight, we outlined a scalable model that reimagines travel as a personal, contextual, and community-led experience. This approach shifted Exceptional ALIEN’s content strategy toward a user-generated model—one that remains trustworthy precisely because it’s shaped by a like-minded community. By capturing data from user engagement and shared recommendations, the platform could deliver meaningful, personalized travel guidance. Given EA’s concerns about future content scalability, this community-driven model not only solved for scale but reinforced the brand’s core promise of high-value, inspiring travel recommendations.

MVP: Initial Launch

Our MVP consolidated EA’s offerings by fixating on the inpiration supplied from the content experience. This was mostly defined by Playbooks (People) and Places (Gems). Users are then encouraged to collect places they like and create their own Playbooks so they can personalise and plan.

North Star IA

This was a projected view of the updated EA IA with all the sprints considered. Not all positioning within the IA logic was fixed but was more a reflection of the ambitions of the North Star during discovery and develop phase.

Concept & Usability Testing

The primary goal of our testing was to refine the current iteration of the EA app’s information architecture and overall experience, while validating or challenging its existing features. We focused on four key areas: Concept, Information Architecture, UX Flows, and Features. The testing proved highly effective in validating the initial concepts and structure of the EA travel tool. While several valuable micro-insights emerged, the following represent our key findings.

Phase Rollout

We then proposed a phased rollout plan to help map the launch of each future-state component. Guided by our core goals—a streamlined, inspiring travel tool and a community-driven content strategy—we also accounted for development timelines and the need to validate key elements of the concept. The phases were outlined as follows:

Inspiration& Utility

Provide users greater context within the EA app experience by supplying a interactive map for that decisive moment.
But why?

Our inspiration can trigger users into action and if there is a tool within the app experience that helps users commit, this will bring more value to the platform. Testing found that 50% of users wanted a map as it would give them context of distance and therefore would help them determine if they would go.

Community

Allow users to connect with their community and share, see and collect Playbooks from others around their locale or around the world.
But why?

People trust those who are close to them and they will reach out to their own community for reference before branching out. People are also curious. Seeing what someone suggests from across the world will drive them to question, to ask and to explore.

User Contribution

Allow users to provide their own Gem suggestions, travel insights and advice on moving abroad. This will bring communities together and also allow EA to achieve the projected North Star.
But why?

All people have a favourite place they would be happy to recommend and this level of insight might never be captured by EA. By allowing users to share their own Gems, insights and travel suggestions, we provide a platform for a shared community whilst also taking the opportunity to transform these user insights into a greater personalised experience.

MVP Wireframes & Launch

After many iterations of low & high fidelity wireframes, constraints on timelines for the second round of investment meant a further trimming of the proposed phase 1 MVP. Key experiencial features such as user profiling and maps were pushed to post MVP to prioristise business quarterly goals. Despite user testing validating a lot of core principles for the phase rollout, it was certain what features were required for the post MVP push.
What was designed and built was founded on the premise of providing a inspirational travel tool with semblances of community inspiration. From both the team and the clients perspective, all were very pleased with what was created...

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