The main aim of my research project is to use a multidisciplinary and mixed method approach to design an app to increase Indonesia’s brand awareness as an adventurous place to visit. Tourism is becoming a significant service for most of the country, and thus the services that are related to tourism contribute to a huge percentage of Indonesian Gross Domestic Product. It is a highly competitive business requiring originality and innovation across the nation’s geographical, cultural, service and political status. It is a multi-sector industry that encompasses the livelihood of the masses. While this may be complex, it also an important wealth earner for various sectors that are involved in tourism.

My app informs and entices certain kind of personas to more likely select Indonesia other than a neighbouring country as their travel destination. Therefore, the app must reflect these needs and must be highly interactive and meaningful to navigate and leave a permanent impression. To do so, understanding certain aspects of the potential users are required. These potential users are a new generation of tourists, whose characteristics are being perceived through customers’ journey as detailed in Chapter 2.

My design is applied to a strategic, multi-disciplinary research method and an innovative design method to gather insights on the core criteria emotions and experiences about visiting a place such as Indonesia. It includes a strong literature review in the humanities, branding, and app design. These principles and theories were some of the most important design criteria that guided the app creation. Therefore, it is not merely the design of an app that is technical and beautiful, but rather it is an app that is informed by the needs of tourists that come to visit Indonesia for various reasons, culture, country, and with various amounts of money to spend. To understand the human issue, I gathered insight from the Maslow Hierarchy, Fogg’s Behaviour Model, Four Pleasure Principles, and Indonesian cultures to inform the design of my app, as explained in Chapter 3.

My app design follows the Human-Centred Design approach which has five different processes, which are empathy, ideation, prototyping, evaluation, and iteration. Moreover, this is discussed in detail in Chapter 5, where I describe in detail the function interactivity content of my app design. However, technical feasibility alone will not make a good emotional app. It must, according to design thinking, have two other elements: desirability and viability. This DVF model is important in this project, as discussed in Chapter 4.

The final app design consisted of three major criteria of the design element. These processes were serving to give the user a meaningful, pleasurable experience, education, and entertainment. Together with gamification. I believe I have made my app unique with added value compared to competitors’ apps that mainly serves information. This project consists of an exhibition of practical work that represents the main body of applied research and the exegesis represents the report of the project.