A self-guided walking-tour app for Cape Town, built to solve two problems most tour apps ignore: why would anyone open it a second time, and is it actually safe to explore somewhere unfamiliar alone.
Product Intro
Heritage Tours is a walking-tour app that brings Cape Town’s history to life. Self-guided routes through neighbourhoods like Bo-Kaap, the CBD and the V&A Waterfront link real landmarks with short narrative stops along the way. Badges and points, rewards redeemable at local restaurants and bars, and friends and group tours give people a reason to come back after the first walk, while a built-in safety framework (a panic button, pre-tour guidance and a hands-free audio mode) keeps every route feeling secure.
It’s built for locals who feel they’ve only seen the parts of the city their commute touches. Many already walk for exercise and have tried “explore your city” apps before, only to delete them within a week because they felt like homework or offered nothing to come back for. They want a reason to keep discovering the city, ideally one they can share with friends rather than do alone.
Problem Statement
Walking-tour apps have a retention problem: people download one, use it once and never open it again, because nothing brings them back once the novelty wears off. They also have a trust problem. Walking alone through an unfamiliar part of a city raises real safety concerns, yet most tour apps ignore this entirely and treat themselves as pure content delivery, rather than something that has to earn a person’s confidence to be out exploring on foot.
People don’t return to heritage-tour apps, and safety concerns keep some people from using them at all.
Users & Persona
The core user is curious about where they live, has some free time at the weekend, and wants a reason to get out of the house instead of defaulting to a coffee shop and their phone. They aren’t necessarily history buffs, so the app has to earn their interest rather than assume it. A significant secondary group is people unsure whether it’s safe to explore somewhere unfamiliar alone, and their concerns drove many of the early safety-first design decisions.
Persona: Mike, 27. Two years into living in a new city, Mike walks most weekends and has already deleted a few exploration apps. He’s looking for one that sticks, ideally something he can do with a friend.
How Might We
How might we make solo exploration feel safe without turning onboarding into a wall of warnings?
How might we give people a reason to reopen the app after their first tour is over?
How might we make Heritage Tours something people do with others, not just something they do alone?
These grew directly out of what users need to actually adopt the app: to feel safe starting a walk somewhere unfamiliar, without that safety information slowing down the moment they just want to start walking; to have a reason to come back beyond the content itself; and for the app to be legible fast, since nobody reads onboarding carefully and anything genuinely important has to survive being skimmed.
Research Approach
The project followed the Double Diamond process (discover, define, develop, deliver). Usability testing focused on onboarding, safety comprehension and tour discovery, the areas most likely to trip up first-time users trying the prototype cold, with no walkthrough.
Findings & Insights
Three findings came through clearly and consistently in testing:
People don’t read safety information; they scan for what matters in the moment. The original safety brief stacked four warnings as full paragraphs, each with heavy red icons. One participant said it felt like clicking through terms and conditions. When everything is weighted equally, nothing stands out.
A safety feature nobody can find offers no safety at all. Hands-free mode, arguably the app’s most relevant safety feature, sat on the tour-setup screen throughout testing, yet no one found it without a prompt. A feature’s value depends on whether people discover it, not just on whether it exists.
Small unanswered questions in onboarding cause outsized hesitation. Several participants paused on the interest-selection screen to ask whether they could change their choices later. The app didn’t say, and that small doubt slowed people down at exactly the moment onboarding needed to build momentum.
From Prototype to Final
The safety brief went from four dense paragraphs under a repeated red siren icon to four single-line items, each with its own icon. That freed red to mean “emergency” and nothing else across the app.
Hands-free mode went from a plainly labelled button competing equally with two other options to a clear toggle with a one-line explanation, placed directly beneath the main Begin button rather than beside it.
The homepage went from a screen crowded with competing navigation to a clean layout with just search, trending tours and your in-progress walk, with everything else moved into a slide-out menu.
This elimination of touch points for users ensured cognitive load upon entering the landing page was kept as low as possible. Only showing the things that matter the most.
The Final Product
Slide menu: points progress sits at the top of the drawer, so opening the menu doubles as a quick status check. Rewards carries a notification dot, since it’s the section most likely to bring someone back.
Homepage: a visible points balance and a “continue exploring” section give returning users a specific reason to keep going instead of starting from a blank map.
Map: Nearby, Trending and Group filters reflect three different reasons people open a map, rather than lumping every pin together.
Badges: a line progress bar shows how close you are to your next level (simple and easy to understand), locked badges spell out what unlocks them instead of showing a bare padlock.
Rewards wallet: coupons redeemable at local restaurants and bars, because badges alone won’t bring someone back, but a discount three streets away might. An image of the restaurant/ bar borrows a familiar physical cue so rewards feel tangible.
Friends: an activity feed rather than a static contact list, since seeing what a friend just did is a stronger nudge than a name in a list.
Group tours: a real calendar showing each host and the number of spots left, using urgency and social proof instead of a flat list of dates.
