We were approached by the talented guys at Tandem Design to create a special takeaway experience in the Titanic Belfast Museum for the Northern Ireland Tourism Board.

Approach

Working closely with Tandem and NITB we decided to create a unique iPad app to be installed in the Titanic Belfast lobby. From this ‘Discovery Point’ app visitors would be able to quickly find out what else they can do in Northern Ireland and how to get there.

The app had various technical challenges such as making content available offline as a reliable internet connection could not be guaranteed at all times.

The first step was to define the content, which destinations did NITB want to inform people about? How much information should we give them? NITB have a lot of content for each location so we made sure we only showed the most important content and made valuable information like price and location easily accessible.

Design

It was also important to us that the app be very visual, letting the fantastic photography available sell the great tourist attractions Northern Ireland has to offer.

Finally we felt it was important that make it as easy as possible for visitors to get to the information they want. To facilitate this we divided up the dashboard into categories (where you can see more things under a specific area of interest such as Maritime Heritage), and destinations, giving the visitor quick access to a list of all the places they can potentially go.

Development

On this project we made use of the latest HTML5 and javascript technologies and backed it with a Ruby on Rails API. Further to this, we created a custom-made content management system to allow content to be updated and pushed to all the iPad devices when required.

To automate the import of data, we wrote a wrapper library to connect us to their SOAP-based API.

The Installation

If you fancy checking it out it can be found in the lobby of the Titanic Belfast building.