Welcome to the Culture Connect case study, a personal passion project that brought my love for culture and community to life through thoughtful digital design. Culture Connect was conceived from a simple but powerful idea: to bridge curious locals and travelers with the rich cultural experiences their cities have to offer, in ways that feel personal, seamless, and engaging.
In a world flooded with generic event listings, Culture Connect rises as a mobile app crafted for discovery, connection, and genuine exploration. Taking inspiration from popular platforms like Meetup, but with a cultural soul, the app aggregates museums, art exhibitions, walking tours, and all things enriching within users’ vicinity. Whether on phone or tablet, users can dive deep into culture rooted in their interests and passions, not just scratch the surface.
Cultural enthusiasts, both tourists and locals, often face fragmented information and simplified experiences. The digital tools available miss the mark on personalization, social engagement, and the integration of ticketing to unlock smooth, line-free access. Culture Connect aims to solve all these issues with a minimal yet sophisticated interface catering especially to the conscious 30–60 age group, but designed for anyone who values substance over flash.
As the sole designer, strategist, and developer, I poured energy into every phase, from concept validation, user surveys, persona crafting, to UI design decisions like employing the elegant Playfair Display font for titles. The challenge was to evoke timeless elegance and cultural depth with a clear, fuss-free UI that even parents could comfortably use.
This case study will guide you through each crucial stage of Culture Connect’s creation: primary research, persona development, journey mapping, user flows, design ideation, prototyping, and validation. It embodies a blend of passion-driven creativity and rigorous strategy to build a truly competitive cultural experience app.
Embarking on a project rooted in cultural exploration demands a deep understanding of the people at its heart. For Culture Connect, I began with a methodical yet passion-fueled process of primary research, aiming to uncover what truly motivates urban explorers, seasoned visitors, and everyday locals eager to deepen their city experiences.
Research Goals
Identify the core emotional drivers behind cultural exploration, curiosity, community, and enrichment
Understand what barriers prevent seamless, frequent engagement with cultural activities
Pinpoint what features or information users value most when planning city tours or visiting new exhibitions
Methods Used
Conversations with fellow Travellers: Personal conversations with cultural enthusiasts, museum-goers, and casual visitors to extract motivations, frustrations, and hopes
Verbal Surveys: To quantify preferences, technological familiarity, and leisure habits
Observation & Contextual Inquiry: Spent time at popular cultural spots, noting how visitors interact with existing apps and physical environments
Competitive & Benchmark Analysis: Reviewed existing event listing apps, museums’ digital platforms, and social sharing tools, focusing on usability, engagement, and personalization features
Key Findings & Insights
Users crave personalized itineraries aligned with their passions: art, history, architecture, favoring tailored exploration plans over generic listings
There’s a strong desire for social interaction: sharing experiences, reading reviews, and discussing art with friends or a broader community
Cross-platform consistency and elegant minimalism attract their attention, especially in apps suited for mature, culturally sophisticated audiences
Simplified ticketing and queue skipping are highly valued, especially in major museums or during popular exhibitions
The emotional component: users seek authentic, reflective moments, detailed diary entries that others can see, adding subtle community feel to personal experiences
Research Assets
A set of user personas representing diverse exploration motivations and cultural preferences
Journey maps illustrating typical user pathways, from discovering an event to sharing their experience publicly
With rich insights from our primary research, the next step was to embody those findings into vivid, relatable personas. These personas serve as the compass guiding all design and feature decisions, ensuring the app feels intuitive and meaningful for those it aims to serve.
Personas were carefully crafted using a combination of quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews. The goal was a balanced mix of demographics, motivations, behaviors, and frustrations centered around cultural exploration and digital engagement.
Age: 38
Occupation: University Lecturer
Location: Berlin
Tech Savvy: Comfortable with mobile apps; prefers clean, efficient UI
Goals: Discover new art exhibitions and history tours; attend with friends for social discussion
Frustrations: Overwhelmed by generic event listings; dislikes complicated ticketing processes
Motivations: Deepening cultural knowledge, social connection, convenience
Age: 45
Occupation: Freelance Writer
Location: Rome
Tech Savvy: Intermediate; uses digital tools primarily for planning trips
Goals: Personalized city routes based on time available and interests
Frustrations: Apps overloaded with irrelevant events; lack of authentic user reviews
Motivations: Tailored cultural experiences, efficiency, genuine community insight
Core Problem Statements
Users feel overwhelmed by fragmented, generic cultural listings lacking personalization and social context.
Existing apps largely miss integrating seamless ticket purchasing alongside the discovery experience, causing friction.
Social engagement and shared reflection on cultural experiences remain superficial or absent, limiting community growth.
Navigation and UI complexity deter mature audiences seeking simplicity paired with elegance.
Lack of flexible, personalized routes based on time availability, group preferences, and exploration intensity.
Ideation Sessions & Methodology
Employing ideation techniques like “How Might We” questions, collaborative brainstorming, and sketching workshops with stakeholders and potential users, the team explored wide-ranging ideas, emphasizing inclusivity and simplicity.
Key “How Might We” prompts included:
How might we enable users to discover cultural experiences tailored to their interests effortlessly?
How might we integrate ticketing seamlessly to reduce booking friction and provide premium access?
How might we foster meaningful social interaction, reflection, and community building within the app?
How might we design an elegant interface that resonates emotionally with the targeted 30–60 age group?
How might we craft dynamic personalized routes that adapt to diverse travel styles and group sizes?
Culture Connect centers around two fundamental features that make it not just another event listing app, but a truly personalized cultural companion.
The first is the Personalized Cultural Route, a dynamic itinerary generator tailored to each user’s preferences. Through a guided survey, users specify their interests, time availability, whether a morning visit or a full day, group preferences, and desire for guided or solo exploration. Based on these inputs, the app crafts a bespoke plan highlighting museums, exhibitions, and walking tours all optimized for meaningful cultural immersion. This personalized route respects both depth and convenience, offering users a curated, focused journey instead of overwhelming generic lists.
Complementing this, the second distinguishing feature is the Travel Diary & Reflective Feedback System, designed to enrich cultural experiences with social and emotional depth. After each visit, users can complete quick, thoughtfully designed surveys about their feelings, impressions, and recommendations. The app then automatically generates a concise diary entry, roughly a 3-minute read, capturing their unique cultural reflections. These entries populate a communal city-wide feed fostering interaction through likes and comments, sparking meaningful conversations among users who share interests and experiences, turning exploration into a shared celebration of culture.
Together, these features combine personalized guidance with a rich social dimension, delivering an elegant, minimalistic app experience crafted especially for culturally engaged users aged 30-60. Both features foster deeper connections, with the culture itself and the community around it, setting Culture Connect apart as a thoughtfully designed platform where passion and precision meet.
In defining the core challenges for Culture Connect, it became clear that users demanded an app offering not just a list of cultural events, but a deeply personalized and social exploration experience. The problem space was framed around overcoming fragmented information, improving engagement through meaningful social interactions, and streamlining access to cultural activities.
The two core features that emerged as pivotal solutions are:
Personalized Cultural Route Generator
This feature enables users to create tailored itineraries based on multiple input factors such as their interests, preferred visit duration (morning, full day), group or solo explorations, and choice of guided or self-led tours. By translating preferences into dynamic, ready-to-use schedules, the app removes the overwhelming task of planning and promotes immersive, focused cultural journeys.Travel Diary & Reflective Feedback System
Designed to enrich the solitary art of exploration, this component prompts users post-visit to record emotional responses, impressions, and recommendations via simple surveys. An automatic diary entry is generated from these inputs and published to a community feed, encouraging social engagement and shared reflection. This strengthens the cultural community around the app, making exploration a collective, enriching experience.
These core features addressed key user frustrations with cultural disjointedness and complicated booking processes, enhancing personalization, convenience, and social connection. Throughout ideation, prioritization metrics grounded these features as essential for launch, balancing user benefit with technical feasibility.
This focused approach shaped the roadmap and guided the design phase, ensuring each feature directly answered user needs uncovered during research.
After extensive research, ideation, and iterative prototyping, Culture Connect’s final design delivers a refined, elegant, and powerful mobile experience that meets the cultural explorer’s deepest needs.
Final Product Features
Personalized Cultural Routes: Through a sleek, stepwise onboarding survey, users receive tailored itineraries optimized for their interests, time availability, and social preferences. These routes blend flexibility with depth, balancing solo discovery with group engagement for meaningful cultural immersion.
Integrated Ticketing System: Users can effortlessly purchase tickets within the app, benefiting from streamlined checkout and the option to skip queues at select venues, removing traditional barriers to spontaneous cultural adventures.
Travel Diary & Social Feedback: After visits, users complete brief emotional and reflective prompts, which the app transforms into concise diary entries. These contributions populate a city-wide interactive feed, fostering community by enabling likes and comments, turning solitary experiences into collective celebration.
Minimalist UI with Timeless Elegance: The interface employs classic typography, notably Playfair Display for titles, coupled with clean layouts and subtle animations. Designed with clarity and maturity in mind, it resonates with the 30-60 age demographic seeking an intuitive yet sophisticated cultural companion app.
Responsive Performance on Mobile & Tablet: From handheld city strolls to tablet-backed planning sessions, the app provides seamless, consistent experiences across devices.
Design Highlights
User-Centered Flows: Guided by detailed personas and user journey maps, flows prioritize ease of onboarding, effortless event discovery, and natural progressions from exploration to purchase to reflection.
Visual Consistency: The design system enforces visual harmony via balanced color palettes, spacing, and legibility focused on reducing cognitive load while enhancing emotional connection.
Accessibility: Color contrasts, font sizes, and interactive elements were tested to ensure inclusivity and usability for a broad user base, including older adults.
Microinteractions: Enjoyable yet functional animations provide feedback on user actions (ticket purchase confirmation, diary publication), increasing delight without distraction.
